


Chorus Firsts

by Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes



Series: Nothing Like a Civil War [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Chorus (Red vs. Blue), Developing Friendships, Flashbacks, Gen, Hair Braiding, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Injury Recovery, Muteness, Nightmares, POV Second Person, Panic Attacks, Pre-Season/Series 11, Recovery, SPARTAN Maine, Second Chances, Smoking, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Trust, Various Freelancer characters are referenced in, What-If, obviously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-03 02:50:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 37,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19454794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes/pseuds/Illusion_Of_Sea_Axes
Summary: Maine experiences many firsts in his first six months on Chorus. Not all of them are bad.





	1. Welcome Wagon

* * *

You have your first proper shower after your first few hours on Chorus, after getting maybe an hour nap at Armando’s insistence. The showers down here in HQ, which is a big-ass cavern somewhere under the distant jungle fringe, are communal and designed from old pipes meant to hose off raw minerals before they were shipped up to the surface and transported away. 

They are not like the Freelancer showers, however blurred those appear to you in your mind. There are lockers, beaten and wrecked from age that resemble those of a high school, that have been dragged into a room off the actual showers with benches for personal items to be stowed, but they’re a weird mint green, and they don’t have nametags. 

They give you their biggest pair of clothes, which you set down on a bench before you take the lump of soap, which the Republic has learned to make themselves.

People surely stare at you as you walk to one of the cubicles. Your scarring is intricate and layered, from different times with different treatments. You focus on stripping out of your jumpsuit—

_“God damn,” North breathes, eyes widening as he watches you step in front of your locker, you spin to face him, tense. You didn’t know he was there. His eyes seem caught, pulled onto the scarring adorning your ribcage. Maybe he suspected to see scarring as neat as that on your face—_

—Step under the cold spray. Your breath is caught in the cage of your teeth, and you have to forcibly exhale before the vague notion of lightheadedness becomes any worse. 

Grit and dirt comes free and your hair soaks quickly, clinging to your skin in an unfamiliar kind of sensation. Blood and dirt, the dirt that came from the crash site, comes free from your beard. You never really grew you hair out before, kept it reg length.

Your run your fingers through it, and it mostly parts with little resistance, dried blood coming free from where it caked to your head. You don’t have anything to comb out the knots or kinks that have formed. The cold water chills you to your spine, but it’s soothing on the heat pulsing from your skull. 

You run your fingers over your throat, over the ridges of raised scarring, and squeeze your eyes shut so tightly you see flashing spots instead of Washington, Washington, _Washington down under the wheel of your warthog, so unbelievably small, your blood on his gloves, his armor dented and bent at angles into him and his damaged bodysuit, his blood dripping onto the hard-packed snow—_

You press your face into the metal surface of the shower wall. The cold water hits the massive curve of your back, forking into rivulets along the dips of scarring and muscle, cold sinking into muscles and bone. Pain shocks through your face, a sharp crackle under a water-repellant bandage meant to keep your nose settled, and you suck in the cold air that smells of metal and skin and blood, your blood, dry blood, _breathe_.

Maybe you properly wash yourself off, maybe you don’t, you actually aren’t sure, but you settle for not being coated in mud and dry blood for now. You change quickly and stalk off in the direction of the infirmary with the soldier Armando delegated to ensure you don’t collapse out of nowhere. 

The olive drab shirt tugs at the swells of your triceps and the hem stretches uncomfortably around your waist. You haven’t worn proper civvies in years, but you don’t remember them fitting as poorly. You’re used to a form-fitting bodysuit, though. Most of your life that you can remember was spent in one. You almost died in one.

You decide this is okay.

You have your first nightmare the sixth hour you spend on Chorus, after you’ve showered, in the dark of night.

In your single patient room, you fall asleep to the din of Armando working the rest of the night with other patients and the more muffled noise of the rebels outside. To this noise, as unusual and unfamiliar as it is, you fall asleep. 

  
  


York is grinning his broad, one-dimpled grin from the darkness of his rack. There are no lights. He’s grinning at you and holding a bottle and he extends it to you.

“Want a drink?” 

You stare him down. He shakes it, the anonymous liquid sloshing ominously and no way invited, you don’t drink,

“How did you get that?” The voice is disjointed and disconnected from you, you can’t talk, or can you, you’ve never told York that before— 

York shrugs. A simple roll of his soldiers, he favors his left, he pulled it dragging you into the Pelican— _“HEY! HE’S STILL BREATHING!”_

Your feet thump on dirt as you stoop down and take the bottle from his hand, take a swig from it.

It burns the walls of your mouth, along your fake incisor— no, your teeth are all genuine, _North had the fake_ —

Your nose wrinkles. It tastes terrible and you grimace at it. York laughs— _it echoes, tinny and fractured, a knife carving into the meat in your ribcage, we missed you D—_ takes the bottle back, and tilts his head back to drink, the bottle dinks against the metal of the bunk above him and he’s grinning around it.

You shoved York in a locker the third day you knew him. He never smiled at you like that. 

“Hey, share,” another voice comes from the darkness of the rack and a hand, thin fingered and textured with narrow white lines, hooks around York’s bare shoulder, fingers digging into the curve of muscle. 

Carolina emerges from the shadows.

The air is cold and scrapes the inside of your mouth with the taste of ash and snow and metal. Duality tones that taste yellow and blue and dig into the roots of your teeth and ache like lead fillings and blood on the bottom of your mouth— 

York hands her the bottle. 

Carolina downs the rest of it in one go, eyes wide, toxic green burrowing into your soul, an ache in the mass of you, like she’s pulling apart the very atoms of your heart and brain and spine with a _look_. She does not cringe at the taste. She drops the bottle against the floor and it chimes, hollow glass on metal (dirt?). 

The chime echoes. It echoes but it grows sharp, sharp into the joint of your jaw and your ear drums, your hair stands on end—

“Hey, Maine.” She hums, tilting her head at you, blood red hair falling over her eyes and she doesn’t push it away, twin rivulets of a darker shade trickles down from the back of her neck into the dips of her collarbones—

_“How does it feel?”_

  


You wake with a violent spasm, sucking in air as your left heel thunks against the metal frame of your medical bed and the pain radiates in a dull ache outward into the tips of your toes— when did you take your boots off? 

Your chest feels like someone’s defibrillating the pulped puree of the muscles of your heart, and you clutch at the stretched fabric over the plane of your chest. You feel your heartbeat in every blood vessel.

There’s the warmth of a hand, stretched out over your right bicep, and you follow it up the forearm to the owner— Armando. She’s taken off her gloves. Her hair is no longer in it’s bun, braids running freely over her shoulders. The heat from her hand bleeds into your arm, the lightest squeeze of her fingers soothing in the aftermath. 

You stay on your back. The heart monitor beeps unhelpfully about your heart functioning way too fucking fast at the moment. 

“Hey, Maine, I’m here, I’m here.” A beat, two, three, four, count them to your breathing, “You okay?”

You stare at her, feeling the uncomfortable stick of sweat-soaked fabric under your hand. You don’t give her an answer. 

Armando blinks at you, the light of the monitors outlining the downward curve of the side of her mouth. 

The ashy, metallic taste is still clinging to your mouth. 

* * *

You have your first official visitor two days after you join the New Republic. Felix never makes a return and Armando is the only medic who sees you, even when she’s supposed to be off shift. You can’t confirm this, but you’re pretty sure she spends her breaks here. She’s unwilling to let you loose in the cavern, as ragged as you are. You can’t tell her she’s wrong.

Your first official visitor is Lieutenant General Kimball, as Armando introduces her. 

Kimball is taller than Armando, but not taller than you, and she enters the room with her helmet already off. Her skin is lighter than Armando’s and she keeps her wavy hair tucked in a bun at the base of her skull. There’s a scar that curves up from under the top of her bodysuit, from some point on her neck up to the dip of the inner curve of her jaw.

“Go attend to your other patients for now, Harriet. I’ll be quick.” Armando pauses, a moment, before turning and exiting out the door. It’s an actual door. The New Republic doesn’t have the power to spare for automatic doors. You feel less like you’re entrapped in a spaceship this way, even though you’re allowed to go outside whenever you want (with a babysitter).

You hold your datapad in your lap, ready to type out your answers. 

“Hello, Maine.” The name seems to fit her mouth somewhat odd. “As Harriet said, I’m Vanessa Kimball. You can call me Vanessa.” 

“Okay.” 

“I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t believe what Felix was saying out there. That he found _a Spartan_.”

Something about that digs at the wrong memory, the wrong chunk at the back of your skull, _“A_ real _Spartan could do more than you—”_ but your face twitches in the only betrayal of that. 

“But, I’m not gonna go off what Felix says. I’m gonna ask you. Alright?” You nod. “Okay. So, you’re Ex-UNSC?”

Nod.

“Why’d you defect?”

“Something else.” You are not going to admit to this woman you went crazy. You are not going to admit you lost your goddamn mind and became what was, in effect, a meat puppet.

With a gun. 

And strength mods. 

“Something else?”

“Personal. Don’t wanna talk about it.” 

“Okay. That’s fine. So, how long did you serve?” 

That’s a thinker. Kimball’s questions are not like the doctors and techs’ questions. Or, at least, not in execution. It’s kinder this way. She’s not cataloguing the answers on any datapad, either. 

“Ten years, rough guess.”

“Rough guess?”

“Memory isn’t clear. Why do you ask?” 

“Well, as much as we hate to admit it, we don’t have much here in ways of proper service experience. Hine and I served in the colonial militia, before everything really went off the rails.” 

You probably know the story by a different face, different name, different time, but you don’t ask her. You don’t really feel you have the right to hear that story. And, at the moment, it probably isn’t wise to ask.

“I will help in any way I can.”

“I know, you’ve said that many times already. Felix says we shouldn’t assign you a rank until we see how well you operate. And,” she exhales as if this pains her to say somehow. “I agree. But, Armando wants to wait before she lets you do any training or drills, let alone active duty.”

“I want to help.”

“You’re already helping.”

“I want to help on the field.” The voice does not contain your desire, your want, that would have you ready on any mat, any scenario, to help. You don’t even acknowledge that statement from Kimball, that you’re already helping. How are you helping? You’re cooped up in a metal box with a broken nose. That’s not helping. 

“Maine, you need to recover first. We also need to recover some armor big enough for you before we send you out into the middle of an active war zone.” 

That, unfortunately, makes total sense. 

“How long until then?” 

“The armor is something we have to hope for, but—” 

“No. Until I recover.” Until you can help. 

“Armando estimates two weeks for your nose and your concussion.” Kimball leans forward, elbows resting on her knees. It’s not a menacing posture, however. It’s a concerned one. The hard lines of armor and bodysuit somehow seem soft. “But we’re not sure.”A broken nose is not debilitating. You’ve ran ops with worse. 

“Not sure?”

“We don’t know if you’re someone we can safely let onto the field.” That’s a new concern. “We’ve been losing people, Maine, and we don’t want to lose more.”

Your head tilts to the side as you stare Kimball down, trying to find a meaning in those words. She’s polite enough to give it to you.

“We don’t know if we can trust you on the field.” 

“Why?”

“Because you just survived a ship crash… And Armando is concerned about your stability. I don’t know what you’ve been through, Maine, and I don’t expect you’ll try to explain it to me.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Maine, if the General puts you on that field, she’s going to expect that you can protect your fellow soldiers, complete your objectives, and avoid casualties to the best of your abilities. And I’m not sure we can… trust you to do that.”

“Because I defected?”

“Yes,” that doesn’t sting as much as it maybe would. You get it. You don’t like it but you get it. 

And you hate it. 

“I want to help.” You type out again. Kimball nods her head and stands up.

“I know.”

You watch Kimball walk away. You are not a member of the New Republic yet. 

But they haven’t said you can’t be. 

* * *

A week into your stay on Chorus, you see the aftermath of a full skirmish.

You are reading off the data-pad’s saved files of Chorus’ history. It’s nothing particularly interesting, it’s nearly clinical in its description, a clear UNSC leaning in the words. You learn that Chorus has a tendency for extreme weather and a big ass desert that no one has succeeded in living on. It was desirable for its metals and the ancient alien sites, though those were no longer active. 

Then the yelling starts. 

The yelling is muffled by the metal walls, but you can hear it. It’s enough to get you to set down your datapad and walk over to the entryway to stick your head out into the hallway. Then the yelling turns to screaming.

A moment later, the noise enters the infirmary. It fills it, a cacophony of people screaming names, instructions, incoherent worry, that bounces off the flat metal walls.

Another medic, one you know only as Daisy, appears around the corner. Her purple-accented armor is smeared in bright red and her face has lost color. She rushes past you to another room, pulling out a handful of medical supplies and rushing past you at what is barely short of a sprint. 

You follow her. 

The sight you come across is chaotic. Patients, ones who can stand on their own, are jumping out of their beds and offering them or pulling moving tables and visitors out of the way, asking to help, their voices cutting into each other. 

In the eye of the chaos is a lot of blood. A lot. It is pooling on the floor and sticking to anyone touching it. The source is a handful of soldiers. Two are still standing, clutching at bleeding gaps between their armor plating. The rest, however, are being carried or set down against any horizontal surface they can fit on.

Your height is beneficial. It gives you close to an overhead view of the chaos. 

One soldier is small, ridiculously small, and their visor is blown into their face. Another’s arm is pointing in a very wrong direction and coated in blood and—

Someone in armor bumps into you. It’s a solid thunk of metal-alloy against your shoulder that sends you a step towards the wall. You turn and look down to see the blank, faceless visor of Vanessa Kimball. 

“Go back to your room, Maine.” She says. You stare at her, at the distorted version of your face. The bandage holding your healing nose in place, covering the long thin scar that curves over your cheekbones and the bridge. 

“Maine!” Armando yells and you turn. She’s holding up one soldier by herself, the one with his visor blown in. His hand is cupped over stomach, blood running down in rivulets that pool at the soldier’s boots. His other arm hangs limply, unmoving, trapped between his armor and Armando’s. “Help me carry him!”

You walk over to Armando. You hook an arm under the soldier’s limp one, though he whines painfully behind his teeth, and help Armando carry him to another room. 

His head lolls, helmet thunking against the side of your head.

“T-They ambushed us… We- we didn’t—” He’s speaking around blood and fragments of his visor, barely conscious. His voice is agonizingly young, and it jars something in your gut that licks, red and burning, at your chest. 

“Hey, hey, easy Crespi. It’s okay.” 

_“York!”_

You aren’t asked to remain once you lay Crespi out on a table for Armando to try and fix. But you do. This isn’t unfamiliar to you, in a way. You’ve seen worse. Had worse. Know worse. 

“Maine, put pressure here, I have to help the others.” She says, pressing gauze against the gash in Crespi’s stomach. You take up the role as she rushes out, rejoining the angry yelling elsewhere, while your hand easily puts the pressure over the wound torn through Crespi’s gut.

“Wh-who’re you?” The soldier chokes, chest spasming. He can’t see that you can’t speak. So you growl. 

“Huh?”

You can’t help him aside from doing what Armando asks. So you remain quiet, applying pressure. You’ve learned that biofoam seems to be in short supply out here. The gauze absorbs the blood quickly, more is pooling onto the table in reflective scarlet that sticks to your fingers, fills the dips and creases in your hands.

Crespi’s voice grows more and more distant as the seconds, minutes, pass. Armando shows up a few minutes later, stained in other blood, and she quickly begins ravaging the cabinet in the corner of the room, muttering “biofoam,” over and over. 

She comes to you with an old pen and forces your hands aside (the gauze stick to you) to stick it into Crespi’s wound and pressed down. Crespi cries out, weakly flailing and crying and—

_Dying, dying, bleeding out on the Pelican floor, screaming the air out of you as they pump you full of it—_

You step away. You step away from the bed and Crespi and Armando. You aren’t shaking. You aren’t. But your insides burn with phantom pain, your bloodied hands hover over the scarring over your left lung— 

You’re standing outside the backdoor of the infirmary, hands pressed flat against the metal to keep you standing, staring blankly at the rocky ground. Your breathing is coming in and out fast. The air isn’t cold. It’s not. Not _Sidewinder_ cold, anyway. You don’t remember moving.

There’s a red handprint smeared in your shirt, you can feel the stick and residual heat through the fabric. 

Armando finds you slumped against the metal out there later, and for a moment she leans against the open door, staring at you. 

“Maine? You alright?”

You stare down at your bloody shirt. The scarlet soaked through the thin desert drab fabric. A bodysuit was easy to clean blood off of. 

You don’t take Armando’s extended hand to help you up. You don’t need it. You don’t.

  


You’re moved to the barracks that night. This isn’t because you’re an official soldier, because Kimball quietly corrects this with a tone of voice that channels Carolina — _We lost C.T_ — but she leaves you there because your room is needed more for the dying soldiers than the possibly psychotic ex-marine with a broken nose.

Your hands are still stained in the soldier’s blood when she assigns you to the barrack with a clean shirt and the datapad from the infirmary. You clean them off slowly, staring as the pink water flows down the drain of the sink. Your hands are scarred and calloused, you run fingers over the dips over and over until any sign of Crespi’s blood is gone from your hands.

When you look up in the mirror, you see the tousled, long hair hanging over your forehead, and the facial hair that swallows the lower half of your face. Your eyes are dark, light bouncing off them like pools of thick water. 

You don’t plan on cutting your hair. There’s a tattoo, scarring, all of it, is under that and you don’t want to show it. The beard is another story, though. It’s cut uneven, like maybe at some point you took a combat knife to it just to easier fit it into the chin of your bodysuit. 

Don’t think about that too hard.

The barrack is quiet that night. You remain seated on your new bunk, staring at the words on your datapad, unreading, until lights out. You tuck yourself into the darkness where you can’t see who is staring you down as they get to bed. 

The sound of people sleeping around you is weirdly familiar in a vague, long ago way.

You wake up calmly in the morning, Maine, at the sound of the other rebels moving around. You tie your boots and get up. None of the other soldiers talk to you. They stare, but they don’t talk (to you), as you leave the barracks.

You could go to the infirmary. But why would you? 

So you don’t.

Instead, for the first time in a long while, you go for a jog.

* * *

Over a week following your arrival on Chorus, you’re approached by soldiers actually willing to initiate conversation who _aren’t_ the ones at the mess hall that want to fill the noise between you and them despite the fact you can’t reciprocate it even if you wanted to, which you don’t. 

Hine and Armando are the only ones who talk to you at a consistent rate. Kimball is occupied arranging patrols and Felix’s future pay cut most of the time. 

You blame Felix for the way the soldiers stare but don’t talk. There’s apparently a designated ‘story spot’ near the barracks and it’s impossible not to hear Felix telling the tales of Spartans when you want to just sit down in the barracks to read (not think. Thinking leads you in loops that make your head and chest ache) in private. 

The younger soldiers are dumb enough to buy into the PR of the Spartan program, even as it came out of Felix’s mouth. 

And it’s one of the days as you walk past that they decide to ask you.

“Hey,” one soldier, who has not taken off his helmet, approaches you. You have not been allowed to join the training, let alone have your own set of armor. Kimball is working on it, though. “You’re a Spartan, right?”

You’re holding your datapad under one arm. You don’t leave the barracks without it. 

But you don’t pull it out to answer. You just stare the soldier down. His friends fold their arms. “That’s a dumb question.” One points out. “He’s _obviously_ a Spartan. Ask him something smart!”

“Fuck you, Danvers.”

“Oh, what happened to your cool armor?” You take your datapad out from under your arm and tap out an answer. This isn’t hard. Armor isn’t hard. 

“Don’t have it.” You haven’t worn armor in what’s felt like months. You can’t really verify anything with anyone, though. 

“Don’t all Spartans have armor?”

“Not me.” 

  
“Can you really take on an entire alien platoon?” One asks, bouncing like an excited child in front of the previous questioner.

You… Actually don’t have an answer for this one. You have to think on it. You’re not Master Chief, no matter what comparisons Felix or these kids might draw. 

“Of fuckin’ course he can!” Felix cuts in, channeling the walk of a proud, strutting cat. He stops near you, makes an aborted movement with his arm as if he was going to sling his arm around you but then figured that maybe you’d bite him. He’s wearing his helmet. “This guy survived a ship crash!” 

“Woah, really?” You nod, because you have. You’ve survived two, actually—

_What are you doing? No- NO_ — the air is frozen out of your lungs, even under the rays of Chorus’ midday sun. The cold climbs out of your lungs and into your throat, the frost burrowing into you, sinking into the tenderized meat of your throat. 

Felix is still talking. 

Breathe, Maine. Don’t forget to fucking breathe. 

This must be why Armando wanted to keep visitors away. So they wouldn’t ask questions like _this_.

“Hey- Hey, dude, where are you going?” Felix calls. He’s behind you with the soldiers and you are walking away, walking, not running, don’t start running from a handful of rebels that sound more like kids, you didn’t run from the Covenant, didn’t run from the Insurrectionists, didn’t run from Tex, or from Sigma, from the Director, _from the Chairman—_

You suck in a breath and the air is damp. Cold in a way that isn’t snow, cold in a way that isn’t the frost in the back of your throat, and you throw out an arm to stop yourself from falling into the wall. The steep, uneven surface of rock digs into your palms and loose grains come loose against the calluses of your broad fingers. 

You’re inside a cave. There’s metal structures, holding up the rock above you, but this cave doesn’t expand very far inwards. It’s dark and quiet and there’s no one else here to watch as you drop to the ground. Your datapad lands in the dirt at your side and you press your back against the rock. 

Breathe.

Breathe. 

* * *

After your second week on Chorus, you’re finally allowed to officially join the New Republic. 

There’s a test you have to pass just to show your skills, once Armando’s cleared you for strenuous activity. As Felix is so intent on saying, you’re a Spartan after all. 

Kimball is the one who handles the test. Not Hine, though she is there, watching with Felix and Armando (who is there to make sure you don’t die, somehow).

Run, shoot, duck, _finish_. Simple. 

You’re fast. Very fast. You won’t run a stumbled Spartan’s pace, you’re gonna run a full-blown Spartan’s sprint, and you have pretty damn good aim. 

“Are you sure you’re gonna be able to handle this, Maine?” Kimball asks as she stands at the side of the track, set up in the cavern where the other soldiers can see you. You can ignore them, though. 

Nod. Yes, you can. You _can_ do it. 

“Okay,” she folds her arms. “Ready… Go!”

Now, out in the sun, ancient battle rifle in hand, booking it across a quarter mile of uneven ground, you’re fairly confident. Fairly confident in every thump of your boots on ground, the momentum travelling through you, heart beating fast and hard in your chest.

This isn’t like running the tests in the contained test room of the medical facility they kept you on for so long, where they ran you in a circle in a sterile white room with a speedometer just for a few minutes before they moved you on. 

Your legs ache, burn, but you are running under the sun with a gun in hand and the heat seeps into your back and your shoulders and your dark hair absorbs heat like fucking crazy but you wouldn’t have known this, kept in prison or the medical facility. 

The gun recoil when you bring it up to aim is familiar, sharpened by the lack of armor, but muscle memory kicks in fast. Muscle memory is, at the moment, your favorite kind of memory. 

You duck, kicking up dust as you tuck your rifle under your shirt, the metal hot against skin in an unfamiliar way because that was never allowed in training of any kind, you were always in a bodysuit, and army crawl your way as fast as you can to the end. Improvising, Maine, because you don’t have a weapon mount on your back. 

You’re panting and sweating and your hair and shirt and an unpleasant amount of sand is sticking to your skin. Your heart still beats, rhythmic thumps in your chest that seem to reverberate through your musculature. You pull out the rifle from under the back of your shirt and drop it in the dirt and there’s a strong pull in your chest that makes you want to smile. 

Kimball is not wearing a helmet so you can see her wide eyes and open mouth. You look to Hine and Felix and she’s smiling at you, helmet under her arm, as they walk over. Felix isn’t making an obvious expression in his body language, behind his visor. He’s silent. 

Your swipe at your hair, keeping it from your eyes. That’s a nuisance you never realized you’d have to deal with. 

“That was amazing.” Kimball tells you, a near-smile on her lips. She claps a gloved hand on your shoulder. “Welcome to the Republic.” 

(The sensation is different, but not enough, not enough to skirt the memory of Wash, grinning, _‘welcome to the tea—_ )

Now all you need is some armor. 

* * *

During your third week on Chorus, shortly after you’ve officially joined their ranks, you meet Bitters. He’s actually one of the few that spends more time in the barracks, no matter what, only gone when deployed to patrols or the rare assignment. 

You don’t meet him during a patrol. You meet him in the cave you’ve designated for breathing room, away from the rest of the Republic and their desperate verbal prying thanks to Felix turning into a projector of distantly recalled UNSC propaganda. 

Though you can’t really blame Felix for the fact you aced the test in a way that most couldn’t imagine matching. 

_“You sure like to show off, huh, Maine?”_ Echoes like pins and needles in the back of your throat. 

You find Bitters, settled on a rock in the cave, smoking. You didn’t know the New Republic had access to cigarettes. Though, judging from the smell, it probably isn’t a cigarette. 

The ashy taste of a cigarette, it lingers in the back of your throat, even though you haven’t seen a cigarette for years, though you can’t recall if you ever smoked them. 

Bitters is a guy in his mid-twenties, older than a good portion of the New Republic you’ve seen (though their faces could be deceiving. You look pretty damn young for a technically middle-aged war vet) with non-reg hair. Most of the New Republic has non-reg hair, especially the dark-skinned blonde that hangs around the mens’ barracks who somehow had a bubble-gum pink streak through the curls. 

Bitters has his hair pulled up half in a ponytail, the other half in a tangle of braids. 

When you show up in the mouth of the cave, insides somehow communicating the frequency of a tuning fork after one soldier stared you in the face and asked how old you really were, Bitters pauses mid-puff to stare wide-eyed at you. 

That’s what you both do for about sixty seconds. Stare. The cave smells like burnt plant and Bitters’ helmet is set down next to him.

This has never happened before, you don’t think. 

Bitters blinks at you once, twice. “Please don’t report me.” 

You blink at him as he had blinked at you, before stepping further into the cave and looking at whatever it is Bitters is smoking. He follows your gaze to the bunt and then back to your face before awkwardly extending it towards you. 

“You want a hit?”

You get a noseful of smoke and decide, no, you don’t. You shake your head and Bitters takes it back into his mouth, taking a drag. “Cool. Why’re you here?” 

You bring your datapad up and type, “breathing room.”

“Ah, yeah. Same reason I’m here...” He puffs and then notices you’re still standing. “You can sit down, you know? I don’t care.”

You sit down next to Bitters on the ground, where you tend to sit anyway. 

You sit there in silence for a while, until Bitters slumps back. “So, what did you need a breather from, anyway?” 

“People,” you type out. You’re not gonna get into the specifics. Bitters doesn’t seem to want them, either. He shrugs, rolling his blunt between his pointer and thumb. 

“Yeah, people can be a pain. ‘Specially when you have to keep them from getting themselves killed.” He puts the blunt back to his lips.

“You command?”

“Probably gonna get promoted to second lieutenant if anyone else dies soon. Stopped keeping track a while ago.” You tilt your head at him. Bitters reminds you of South in all the minute ways—

_“Know what? I don’t care. The universe’s gonna fuckin end and what’re we gonna be able to say we did about it? Jack fuckin shit, shooting other assholes to make ourselves a place on the damn leaderboard.” A swig. “What’s the fuckin’ point of that?”_

_You don’t answer her. What could you say? You don’t have Sigma—_

“Hey,” Bitters’ voice cuts through and the muscles of your throat have tightened to an air-tight seal, can’t breathe, breathe, breathe— “You alright, man?”

You suck in air, cough it out, and suck in more. Bitters is staring at you and maybe he’s worried whatever he was smoking triggered a reaction in you because he’s holding his blunt far away from you with one hand and the other is hovering over your shoulder like maybe he should try and ground you with touch alone. 

You nod. You’re alright. Bitters’ hand drops back to his side.

“Okay…” He relaxes, puffs, but his eyes are still on you. A minute passes. Two. You listen to the pattern of Bitters’ inhaling and exhaling and the crinkling of his blunt, and it’s unfamiliar in a pleasant way. “Okay.”

You run into Bitters in the ‘breathing cave’ again. And again. It becomes a proper hiding place for you, when everyone insists on meeting you, talking to you, and Kimball is working on acquiring armor and Hine’s busy running the New Republic.

“Y’know, I’m pretty sure some of the girls are trying to bribe Felix into tracking you down with food.” Bitters says, one day, around a blunt. You do not know what he’s smoking. He says it’s some kind of native Chorus plant, but that’s all you know. That and it helps Bitters destress. “Dunno how that’s gonna work.” 

“Don’t you pay him in weapons?”

“Hine does, yeah. We ran out of money around the same time Levitt got his guts blown out by some sniper.” 

“Levitt?”

“Old general. He was an idiot. Didn’t listen to Felix when he told him the goddamn peace talks were a fuckin’ trap.” He sucks in a breath like the smoke angered him. 

“Peace talks?” Bitters exhales, long and drawn out, and stares blankly ahead. For a moment, you don’t think he’ll answer. 

“No one likes to talk about those.” He finally answers. “People hoped the war would finally fuckin’ end. Then it didn’t.” 

You stare at Bitters. You study the way his face curves along skull, his face entirely muscle and skin. 

His words burrow into your sternum, leak into your chest. 

You hoped the war would finally end, on Sidewinder, hanging from that goddamn cliff, with Washington’s blood on your hands and your own in your mouth. 

And yet,

It didn’t. 

* * *

Midway through your third week on Chorus, you receive your armor.

Kimball approaches you in the camp, helmet under her arm. She doesn’t frequently wear her helmet in camp, you’ve noticed, which you can appreciate for the emotional reasons if not for the logical ones. The cavern is probably the safest place on Chorus, though.

“Hey, Maine,” she calls, intercepting the approaching squad of rebels, which include the blonde who you can’t recall ever hearing talk. But Kimball, she’s got your attention. “We’ve got your armor. Follow me.” 

And you do. You haven’t worn armor in a long time, the last time you were wearing it, it was a cage and also the only thing keeping you alive. 

New Republic armor is different. 

Kimball brings you to Hine, who hands over your bodysuit and sends you to a room to change into it. It isn’t the same as your old bodysuit, it isn’t the most comfortable thing ever, but it’s relatively snug and it’s an old sensation you can still stand. 

You stand there, half-zipped into your bodysuit, staring down at the curves of your muscle under bodysuit, for a minute or two, before you finally shake yourself out of it, zip up, and step out to Hine and Kimball.

Kimball shows you how to put the armor on. Sand paint with blue trim, typical infantry color. It isn’t power armor, but it’ll catch a bullet. That’s all you need, so long as you get put on the field. You’d like to be somewhere else that isn’t this cavern underneath the jungle, even if it is full of well-intended faces.

She gives you the helmet last, once you’re encased in Republic armor you have no knowledge of.

You place the helmet on your head and thumb the seal. You blink at Kimball from behind your visor, noting she can’t see you. The helmet configuration is different than your old one. Your field of vision is restricted and the HUD is stripped down to bare essentials of your own biodata, available COMfreqs (just one), and status of the armor’s integrity.

“How is it?” Kimball asks, tilting her head up at you. For a moment, you try to find the COM messaging. The HUD is arranged differently, though, and there doesn’t seem to be an option for it.

After a moment, you give Kimball a thumbs up. 

She smiles. Not a toothy smile, her lips don’t part, but this is the first time you’ve seen Kimball smile at you.

Something in the deep recesses of your chest warms at that.


	2. Capture the Flag

You spend the latter half of your third week on Chorus mostly in armor. Your height makes it quite obvious to anyone else who is behind the helmet, but they’re not as weird about it. Or maybe that’s just you.

You join the other soldiers in training, which mainly consist of laps and exercises, spend your free time figuring out your HUD, and put a lot of practice in on the shooting range. You have to get used to shooting with your new shape of visor. 

All of your time, you occupy it with the sensation of a gun in your hand or trying to find a more comfortable way to communicate than the data-pad.

And shooting something that a normal soldier is expected to carry.

One thing you hadn’t expected to deal with, though, is your hair.

Your bangs keep sticking to your face and getting in your eyes and you can’t fix it with your helmet on. Which means that you’re half-blind on most of the training, until you take off your helmet and fix it. 

However, you are still a damn dangerous soldier. And so you deal with it. You stand in line with the other soldiers (though they’re not in a perfect row) as Kimball steps out next to Hine. 

“Alright, troops. We’re gonna run sim of capture the flag today. Your job is to infiltrate the base and take the flag in a coordinated fashion and then make a getaway with minimal casualties. Understood?”

“Yes, ma’am!” The soldiers shout. You grunt, loud, and nod your head. That gets you a couple looks, but it isn’t like you can shout your enthusiasm. Hine stops to glance at you, before nodding. 

“Good. Kimball will be here to supervise and ensure you follow the rules.” She speaks as if this is a common problem. “I’ll be hearing about your progress through her.” Hine returns her helmet to her head and marches off the platform, leaving Kimball in her place. She’s wearing her helmet.

“Alright, group up!” 

You listen to her explain the guns, mainly for your benefit, which are supposed to simulate the damage caused by a gunshot via your armor. It isn’t lock down paint, though. Your squad is led by a second lieutenant named Andersmith. The squad itself is composed of three girls, Belmonte, Fabbri, and Vass and one guy, Barone. This does not include you and Andersmith. 

He approaches you, and thumps a hand on your shoulder. “Welcome to the team, sir! And may I say, it is an honor to serve with a veteran such as yourself.”

You can only grunt. It’s a weird reaction, honestly, especially since Andersmith outranks you. You look up at the rest of Blue squad, who all seem to be kinda stunned you’re even here. Two of them are whispering. 

Don’t let it bug you, Maine. Just follow the instructions, run the drill. 

“Alright. Maine, do you have any strategy advice to offer?” Andersmith asks, looking to you. You note a message appears from him in the corner of your HUD labeled ‘MAP.’

However, you shake your head. You were never asked for strategy advice. Your strategies included you running in and killing as many hostiles as possible and then maybe _not_ dying. Those probably wouldn’t work here.

You think, after all those years, you would’ve picked something up _from Carolin—_

_Cold, cold,_ sinking into the roots of your teeth, duality _screeching_ tones, hits you like a wave of nausea. You shift on your feet, but you don’t try to steady yourself as your stomach twists and, for a moment, gravity releases its hold on the contents (an old MRE) of your stomach.

Andersmith is talking. You don’t hear the words, just the vague impression of his voice. 

“Why can’t we use the plan we used last time?” Someone asks, arms folded. No one’s seemed to notice your.... _moment_. 

“Yeah, we can do that one.” 

“Because they will expect it!” Andersmith answers, smacking fiists in lack of a table to slap his hands on. “And General Hine says we should test new strategies constantly.”

“So? She’s not here to make us.”

“Stow that talk, Belmonte! Let’s just do our best and show Kimball just how skilled we are.” There’s some whispering. You catch, “maybe she’ll put us on the next hit-n-run” and something about smashing in the Feds’ faces. 

You don’t know how you should feel about them, the Feds. You’ve superimposed your current impression of the UNSC onto the F.A.C, though it lacks the personal touch of the scarring at the base of your skull and over your cloned left lung. 

You just have to remember Crespi, though, permanently blinded and out of duty at nineteen years (you learned this from snatches of conversation), and it lights a dull match at the base of your rib cage. 

There are more instances like that ahead, you’re sure. It’s a civil war after all. 

You fail the drill. 

Well, that’s not accurate. Your squad gets the flag, which is a tattered old thing composed of green and yellows, but you fail. 

You fail, not because you elbowed a fake Fed in the side hard enough to knock the air out of him or that you triggered the alarms by charging straight in, but because you get shot in front of the abandoned generator building that served as a fake Fed base.

Because you couldn’t hit your enemy (a fast-footed girl) first. Your hair, a spike of it, slicked with sweat, stabs into your eye right as you bring your rifle to bear as you try to spin and put her between your crosshairs. 

It’s a dull sensation at the base of your spine that then triggers something like an EMP through your suit, sending you to the ground, static filling the layer of bodysuit over your skin. 

And you shut the fuck down. 

You gasp, the static sucking the air from your lungs, from your body, _your fingers claw uselessly at the metal, vacant cold snaking into your bloody wounds, no air coming into your helmet, suit shut down, negative space of ‘Alpha Alpha Alpha—_ “MAINE!”

Andersmith appears in your restricted field of vision, flag no longer in hand, and gun cracking out shots in what may be the general direction of your shooter as he hooks his free hand under your flailing left arm. 

“I got you, soldier. I got you.”

Your response is a gasping wheeze that he probably doesn’t hear. 

Andersmith pulls your arm over his shoulder, and _carries_ you.

Not tries to serve as a crutch or support, he’s actively trying to _carry_ you. 

You can’t move your legs, they feel like they’ve been stuffed full of COM static and pins and any attempt to step fails. Your legs feel stuffed full of cotton, any sense of movement a wobbly jelly motion. It’s not like the lockdown paint, though. You _can_ move your legs. 

So you do. Even though it feels like your femur and your kneecaps are filling with the dense mass of pins and needles, pushing into the meat of your calves and the tendons and cartilage, you keep pace with Andersmith as he drags you to the rest of the squad behind an outcropping. 

You drop to the ground unceremoniously alongside Andersmith, who was more likely dragged down by your weight and gravity than his own exhaustion. 

You claw at the jaw of your helmet before ripping it from your head and sucking in a fresh, wet breath of air. Several heads turn at the sight of you breathing heavy, helmet-less.You comb your hair from your eyes. The static sensation is stuck like glue under your tongue, in your teeth. 

_“It doesn’t hurt if you don’t let it hit you.”_ The static shifts, sharp, in your stomach and you suck in another desperate breath.

A bell, a classic, old bell rings out seemingly right next to your head. Your head jerks and you see Belmonte, flag in hand, ringing an old bell.

“Everyone, lay down your weapons. Blue Squad wins!” Kimball’s voice crackles through an old PA system. Andersmith pulls off his own helmet, revealing dark skin and a clean-shaven head. He grins at the squad. 

“Huzzah!” He grabs you by the shoulder pauldron and it hits you that his smile, dimpled, bright teeth and bright eyes set in a dark face, is meant for _you_.

One side of your mouth turns up despite the static thrumming through your legs. 

  


Kimball approaches Blue Squad sans helmet to congratulate them, patting Andersmith on the shoulder. “That was some excellent strategy, Smith.”

Andersmith is absolutely beaming. “Thank you, ma’am!”

“And good job, not leaving your men behind.” She glances at you, dropped on the ground, unable to feel your damn toes.

  


Turns out, the weird static effect of the practice gun wears off after five more minutes, which gives Kimball the perfect opportunity to talk to you alone after the rest of Blue Squad leaves to wash up and grab lunch (more MREs). 

“You did pretty good, Maine.”

You nod. A thanks. You don’t carry your datapad onto the training grounds. It occupies valuable hand space that could hold a weapon. 

“You did set off the alarm, but I’m assuming the Covenant didn’t have many of those?” 

York, one-dimpled grin and fucked up eye, flashes in your mind’s eye. You shake your head. 

Kimball nods back. “Right, well, try and work on your marksmanship before the next run, alright? Close-quarters combat isn’t always an option.” 

Your marksmanship is fine. 

You spend the rest of your free afternoons working on it anyway.

* * *

Your fourth week on Chorus is taken up by the routine of wake up, eat, do training, run drills (given by slightly stunned instructors), maybe have a lunch, continue running drills, then shower up and heading to the rack to snatch some sleep. 

The nightmares have become a sort of roulette, not of content, but of occurrence. 

The content, unfortunately, has not changed. 

Carolina, laying at the base of a cliff, frost-pale, broken, hollow, _“What are you doing?”_

North, collapsed skull baking in the sun’s heat, vacant, voice still ringing through the old structures, _“SOUTH! THETA!”_

Beta, beaten and broken and beyond repair, pistol clutched between locked digits of a dismembered hand, the blood-caked white helmet smeared in hydraulic fluids and coolant clutched to her gut, no blood on her ageless face, as her voice distorts and jitters— _“No. No, Maine… Please. Don’t. Don’t do this. Please.”_

Wash, collapsed next to the battered warthog, armor and body fused and mixed by heat and explosives, alone in the bloody snow— _“I knew you would do this Meta, I just can’t believe it.”_

  
Sometimes you wake up with your fingers buried in the hair at the base of your skull, trying to unplug data crystal chips that aren’t there anymore. It’s a jarring wake up call to dig your nails into the slots. 

You spend a few days going to breakfast almost completely in armor. It makes you more bulky than usual, and people inform you that it’s alright, you don’t need to be in armor every waking hour of the day, really, it’s good to get some sunlight. 

But you feel better this way. So you keep doing it. 

You’re living up to the inhuman register of the Spartan propaganda. It’s good for morale, especially Blue Squad.They’re an unofficial squad for you, now. They might just be your training squad, for now, but they don’t seem to be thinking of letting you leave. Especially Andersmith. 

But then you realize the pitfalls of your behavior when you’re walking from the barracks,

And someone shoots you. 

Someone else in the camp takes a practice gun and shoots you.

The impact knocks through the back of your helmet, a half-second delay, before the sensation of pure static and pain explodes from the curve of your cranium down like falling water contained in skin.

You drop, your knees splintering into pins with the impact of hitting the ground, compounded by the training gun’s shut down of your armor, and you drop to your chest. 

You flail, or you tell your brain to. Move, roll, you’re under attack, fucking move, _move—_

Your elbows thump against the dirt, your limbs turned to stuffed cotton, useless, _(not yours not yours)_ , and your eyes burn, burn, you can’t fucking _breath— is your suit not feeding you oxygen?_ The rasping fills the inside of your helmet, echoes in your ears, as you stare wide-eyed through the slit of your visor, you’re trapped— _drowning, suffocating to death in your suit—_

You attempt to curl your fingers, pins and needles crackling through the knuckles, through the bones and up to your elbows and somehow that triggers nausea. Nausea, sharp and real, pins and needles and cotton not reaching your insides, the bile and stomach acid rising to your ribcage and your throat.

Hands dig into your biceps, a dull sensation, muted by the bodysuit, and suddenly you’re on your back. Bile bubbles up in the back of your throat, you hopelessly gag around it, you’re choking, suffocating, _suffocating, drowning_ — _“I knew you’d do this—” “Don’t do this,” “Maine—” “Meta—” “—META-” Meta meta meta meta,_

Someone tears off your helmet by the chin, jerking your head back with the momentum.

“Maine! Maine, hey, Maine!” Gloved fingers press into your jaw, you’re still rasping, ragged, pained breaths that sound like they’re being dragged through a shredder, “MAINE!” 

Kimball. Kimball is there, hands cupping your jaw, and you gasp uselessly at her, doing your best unintentional impression of a fish out of water. 

“Hey! Hey, where’s the techs?!” Kimball shouts. You still can’t breathe, can’t, air won’t enter your lungs, you’re _suffocating—_ “Someone call a fucking tech, now!” She leans close to you. “Hey, Maine, breathe, breathe, you’re okay, it was a training gun, you’re fine.” Leans away. “Who shot that gun? Who fired that shot? Get down here, now!” She tilts your head back, forcing your airway open and- “Breathe, Maine!”

The air comes in hot, scraping through your airway into your lungs and it sends a sharp ache through the center of your chest. 

Your mouth burns with acid and the static is still crackling along your skin and through your tendons, you can’t fucking move, but you’re breathing.

Kimball breathes a sigh of relief, pats you on the chest. “There you go. There…” She stands up, turning to the gathering of soldiers. “Where’s the soldier who fired that shot? Front and center, right now! Where’s the tech? I need a tech right now!” 

It’s a long two minutes before a tech shows up and rectifies the training-destabilization effect in the armor so you can sit up. 

The motion, the sudden vanishing of the static feeling in your bodysuit, it makes you nearly throw up in between your knees. You manage to _not_ vomit in front of what you realize is probably close to half of the Republic’s able-bodied, all standing there, staring at you. At the front is Andersmith, helmet absent, eyes big, staring at you with concern. 

“Who fired that shot?” Kimball demands again, glaring down her soldiers. “Who thought they had permission to remove a _training_ gun from the training areas?”

“What the fuck is going on?” Your turn your head to see General Hine approaching, armored up, and she stops next to you. “Kimball, what happened?” She’s looking at you as she speaks. You glance up at her to meet her eyes before they move to the soldiers. 

Kimball turns, at perfect attention. “Someone opened fire on Corporal Maine with a training gun, General.” She has the grace to not point out your biostats probably went haywire when you hit the ground. “Hit him straight in the back of the head.” 

“Who brought a training gun into the main camp?” Hine asks, voice turning what you simply describe as scary. “Who thought that was a good idea?”

No one answers immediately. Hine’s brow knits at the center. 

“Well? There’s enough foot traffic in this camp that someone would have to see their fellow soldier bring a training gun. Was it a prank? A joke?” She approaches the recruits like a predator, scouring their ranks. “Tell me, right now, or everyone right here right now will be punished.”  


“Punished how, ma’am?” Someone in the back asks. Hine narrows her eyes in the direction. 

“Good question. Andersmith, how should we punish the dumbass who thought it was a good idea to shoot Corporal Maine with a training gun?” Andersmith stands at ramrod attention when his name is called.

“Demotion, ma’am. It’s against protocol to shoot a fellow soldier with a training gun when they’re not involved in the test scenario.”

“Thank you, Andersmith. You heard him, troops. Surely you wouldn’t want to lose the status of your hard work covering for a rule-breaker?”

You doubt Hine would change the power dynamics of her army so quickly, over a training gun being fired in the central camp. But the threat seems to work.

Two hands shoot up. 

  
“It was Chief Lobos, General!” 

“Chief Lobos?” 

A moment later, the group parted to shove a kid with wild black curls into the front of the General. He straightened to attention. 

“Chief Lobos. Did you shoot your fellow soldier with a training gun, outside of a training situation?”

“I-I-”

“Lobos, you only have to answer yes or no.”

“I...We- we were just joking around, ma’am. We—”

“Thought it would be funny?”

“... At the time, yeah… It’s just a training gun, ma’am, it didn’t hurt him!” 

Kimball’s frown deepens and she glances at you. She doesn’t call out her disagreement with Lobos’ assessment, instead turning back to Hine as she announces; “Lobos, as of right now, you are no longer Chief. Your squad will be handed off to someone else more competent and aware of the consequences of their actions. You will not be permitted access to the training areas without designated supervision and you will be on KP duty indefinitely. Do you understand?”

Lobos blinks, stunned at the General as he processes the punishment. His mouth forms words, but they don’t come out as sound, until he finally slumps in defeat under Hine’s glare. “Yes, General, I understand.”

“Good. Now, everyone, disperse! We’ve all got shit to do other than stand around waiting!” 

Kimball extends a hand to help you up, though she forcibly takes yours when you don’t seem to take the offer, and then pulls you up with an audible grunt. She places a steadying hand on your chest and stares you in the face.

“You good?”

You nod. 

“Alright. Well, I’m gonna send you to Armando. Just to make sure that nothing’s wrong.” You frown at her. She nods her head towards the infirmary. “Go, Maine.” 

You stoop down, slowly, to pick up your helmet and head to the infirmary. 

Armando confirms you’re fine. You’re given a few days off of the training grounds anyway. 

* * *

Your time off of training during your fourth week on Chorus, you meet Katie Jensen. 

Without the team training, there’s a major gap left in your schedule, and you decide to fill it with weapon maintenance. You have plenty of experience with that. 

You aren’t allowed to manage the armory, frankly for the fact you can’t communicate without your datapad, but you are allowed to clean and check the weaponry before it’s accounted for at the end of the day. 

It’s during one of these end-of-the-day checks that you meet Katie Jensen.

You’re settled on a bench at a broad metal table, re-assembling an old BR after giving it a thorough cleaning, when she stops in the doorway with a datapad in hand. Either your presence surprises her, or maybe seeing a giant of a man like you out of armor is a surprise. 

“Oh! I- uh- I didn’t realize you were here.” She has a prominent lisp and you recognize she’s wearing braces. Her hair is a mess of dark reddish-brown curls, tucked back with a bandana with a half-obscured symbol on it you can’t recognize. She blinks at you behind her glasses. “I- I’m Katie Jensen. I’m here to do inventory checks.”

You nod your head. You quickly wipe away the cleaning solution and wipe the rest off your hands. You reassemble the gun you had taken apart to clean and double-check, repeatedly stopping to claw your stary bangs out of your eyes, before returning the gun to it’s spot.

It’ll take you weeks to get through all of the weapons in the armory, which you won’t, but you appreciate the quiet of the armory’s backroom and the simple process of disassembling a gun, cleaning it, and reassembling it. 

“Do you need a hair tie?” Jensen asks as you push your bangs back. You pause, blink at her as her cheeks flush pink and she quickly pulls a black band out of a compartment in her armor and extends it to you.

You walk over and take the offered band and flex it between your thumb and pointer for a minute, trying to recall how to properly pull all your hair through it. There’s the vague concern you’ll snap the plastic, your hands are huge.

“Are you, uh… Do you want some help?” You blink down at Jensen, who stares back at you. “Sorry, you just- you don’t look familiar with hair styling.”

You shrug. You really aren’t, the long hair is a new thing you’re unsure of how you managed it before— _We are—_ _no_. Grit your teeth til the molars ache. Jensen is looking at you. 

You left your datapad on the table you were disassembling firearms on and you don’t wanna grab it.

“I can do it. If you’d like.” That’s… Huh. You shrug and return the hair tie to Jensen’s hands, which are ungloved. “I, uh- Can you sit down? I’m not tall enough.” You nod and slowly take a seat on the bench you were sitting on before. Jensen sets her datapad down on the other side of the table from yours. 

Jensen combs her fingers through your hair, pulling all of it out of your face, the pull weirdly calming, as Jensen quickly pulls all your hair into her hand at the back of your skull. Your eyes slide shut despite yourself. There’s the snap of the hair tie, the muscles of your arms and legs going tense at the sound, and then she steps to your side. 

“There.” She’s smiling, then seems to remember who you are. “I, uh… If that hair tie ever breaks you can come find me. I’ve got plenty.”

You nod a thank you, remaining on the bench for a few moments, living through the warmth crackling down your spine and the phantom sensation of someone combing through your hair, before you pick up your datapad and leave. 

The ends of your mouth are slightly turned towards the sky as you step out of the armory to let Jensen do her work. 

* * *

Your fifth week on Chorus, you and the rest of Blue Squad develop a winning streak. 

Belmonte only points out the hair tie once when she sees you put your hair up before a match, but then you take out half a dozen fake Feds posted in your exit hall during one round and don’t get shot once, so she just shrugs it off. Andersmith doesn’t point it out at all.

Barone brags about the wins during mealtime, and, despite the practices being limited heavily compared to the rest of training operations in the Republic, it starts to make progress through the entire Republic. 

You don’t lose your ‘Spartan’ reputation through this, but now it’s different. 

And you don’t mind.

* * *

Towards the end of your fifth week on Chorus, General Hine approaches you before a match, before you get your helmet on. You straighten to attention and nod. She’s helmet-less, again. 

“Corporal. I wanted to check something with you.” You nod. “A lot of the troops wanna see you and Blue Team in action. Kimball suggests I should, to improve morale and camaraderie, which  _ is  _ important, but I figured I should check with you first. You good with letting ‘em watch?”

You realize it’s a genuine question. Not a “Hey, Maine, does this plan that we’re already gonna do sound good to you—  _ plummeting through the air, too high too high too fucking high, hands knotted around the cable, ‘don’t be a—’ _

Your feet are on the ground, Maine. Your feet are on the goddamn ground. 

You chew it over for a moment, glancing at the rest of Blue Squad. Andersmith is already armored up, waiting for Belmonte to properly tuck her dreads into her helmet. Half of her head was close-cut, the letters  _ NR _ shaved into it. 

You nod your agreement to Hine. She nods back at you, smiling. “Alright. I’ll let the troops know.” She raises her voice so the rest of Blue Squad can hear. “Gear up and get in there, squad!”

“Yes, ma’am!” Andersmith snaps a salute. Hine smiles at him and walks away.

You pull on your helmet and give Andersmith a thumbs up after running a quick armor and weapons check.

  
  


The match goes perfectly, from the first shot to the flag room. You take out two guards on the corridor to the flag room, Andersmith and Belmonte behind you, Barone, Vass, and Fabbri outside holding the exit long enough to get you out. 

You pull to a stop outside the flag room, unhook a flash bang from it’s mag mount on your thigh pull the pin, and toss it into the flag room in one fluid motion. One, two, the room erupts in chaos and you feel the vibration in your feet. You hold up your hand, counting out to Andersmith;  _ one, two, three, go! _

You charge into the room. You take out two Feds across the room, turn and take out a third, and then shoot down one more while Andersmith and Belmonte take out the remaining two. Belmonte hisses a cheer through the COMfreq as you charge forward, clip your rifle to the mag strip on your back and pull the flag from its holder. You hold it, the dented, metal flag pole a light weight in your hands, before you turn around to Andersmith and give him a thumbs up. 

“Flag is secure,” Andersmith announces, turning on his heel to head out of the flag room with you behind him and Belmonte behind you. “Repeat, flag is secure and we are on our way to the exit point.”

_ “Copy that, Andersmith. Prepping for getaway.”  _

Your boots thump heavy on the ground, the momentum creating resounding sounds through metal until you reach the rocks outside. Andersmith is the only one able to keep a close pace with you, the rest of the squad forming an acute angle formation around you. 

You reach the ‘extraction’ point, flag in hand, and you grab hold of the ragged old rope attached to the bell.

With a hard jerk of your hand, you ring it. 

You can feel the vibration of the bell as it rings out, the sound resounding and bouncing off the walls of the cave. 

Belmonte smacks your shoulder and guides your attention to a camera, nestled in the rocks. There’s people watching you, through there. You raise the flag towards the camera, your lips turning upwards.

You lift a hand to your mouth and draw two of your fingers over the helmet under your visor. You’re smiling. 

Felix is the first person after Kimball to congratulate you on the win, patting your arm as he passes. “That was fuckin awesome! I can’t wait to see what you do to the Feds!” 


	3. Patrol Buddies

Your sixth week on Chorus, you’re deployed to the field on patrols with Blue Squad. Nothing too action packed, you’re not patrolling on the edges of Fed land, but they aren’t so bad. 

Andersmith is the one who decides to drive, though you sit in the passenger seat. Belmonte is settled behind you, in the covered back of the old warthog with the rest of Blue Squad.

The warthog has the New Republic emblem, an eagle-looking bird in front of the Chorusan sun, painted on the sides. The paint is faded and chipped away by experiences in live firefights, but it remains.

Andersmith is quiet as he drives through the jungle canopy, heading deeper into the jungle on the same old dirt road they found you on, just in the opposite direction. You’re quiet as well, fingers running in a back and forth pattern on the smooth barrel of your pistol, other hand hooked around the frame bars to steady you.

Your datapad is attached to one of the mag strips on your thigh. You don’t have a much easier way to communicate, at the moment.

You notice the trees grow a bit sparser as you go, their trunks dotted with lighter jagged grooves centered around bullet holes. Vass and Fabbri are quiet as they watch the scenery go by, Belmonte is tapping the barrel of her pistol on her knee, vaguely in tune with what might be a song.

You listen to her, over the rumble of the warthog, and think about what Chorus' music scene must have looked like before it fell to pieces. 

  
  


The ride goes on for a while, getting further and further from the NR HQ. However, you are too busy enjoying the first venture out of the camp that you’ve had since you crash landed on Chorus, which was less a venture and more a near-death marathon. 

Eventually, you break out of the dense parts of the jungle, straight into clear-cut area, mainly occupied by prefab structures meant to maintain security and employees of the quarries, square holes cut straight into the ground. You pass the charred remains of a security checkpoint. In the distance there are overgrown or dead farmlands, dotted by living structures constructed from metal, brick, and concrete into places that would’ve looked pleasant if it wasn’t a ghost town.

This is when you see one of Chorus’ alien structures for the first time. 

The distant shapes hang in the sky, sharp, shiny under the Chorus sun, and very much  _ not  _ natural. Those catch you off guard and you pull yourself higher to look at them. You make a weird stunned noise, one that everyone else catches because you’ve been silent the entire drive. They’re not the weird purple, organic kind of shapes of the Covenant’s constructs, this one is sharp and clean, but just as alien. 

“Oh, yeah, those’re the old floating towers.”

“Hggh?” At least, that’s what comes out. Fabbri glances in your direction, the warthog rumbling along.

“Yeah, they’re all over Chorus. I think they’re one of the reasons this place was colonized in the first place. They don’t do much though, ‘cept float.”

“I remember when my brother would take me to the little fairs they had, back before they stopped having them… The funnel cake was fucking awesome.” Belmonte mutters, falling into her thoughts. After a minute, she whines, “Fuck, now I’m craving funnel cake. You ever had funnel cake, Maine?” 

You can’t recall ever eating funnel cake, or what it’s supposed to look like. What comes to mind is a cake in the shape of a funnel, though you do momentarily ponder how a structure like that would remain upright because cake isn’t solid like concrete and if it was a funnel shape, it would be missing an important structural part in the center.

In answer to Belmonte’s question, you shake your head. 

She gasps, like you’ve offended her-  _ Carolina’s hand pressed dramatically to her chest—  _ “Maine, you’ve never had funnel cake?” You shake your head again. “Okay, I’ve got an addendum to my current goals. Finish this goddamn war, and get this Spartan some goddamn funnel cake.” 

“I’d kill for some funnel cake."

Vass chuckles. “Yeah. Sometimes my sister and I would try to find a way to climb up the things. We tried the streamer things one year.”

“Oh, yeah. You fractured your legs in like five different places, right?” Fabbri asked, sounding like she was smiling. 

“Ugh, yeah, I did. I was miserable.” 

“I remember. You bitched about it ‘til you got out of the casts, and then you used it to get out of gym class.”

“Mr. Percin was an asshole.”

“Not saying he wasn’t.” 

That’s what the patrol devolves into. Anecdotes between Blue Squad, reminiscing the days before the protests-turned-riots and the world fell to pieces. However, the memories are vague according to most of the squad, betraying their age and the time since they last knew a non-warring Chorus. 

You can’t remember a world without war, though that may have more to do with your shit memory than the lack of peace times. 

“Hey, Maine, did you ever have crazy structures back home?” Barone asks, leaning from his seat to look at you. 

_ Indigo blood, staining everything around you, vitrified soil crumbling under your boots, entire neighborhoods morphed into solid black mass—  _ You shrug. You never had a home, nor any permanent alien structures, so you can’t answer. 

“That’s not an answer, man. Where’d you come from?”

You pull up your data-pad, tapping out, “Outer Colonies.”

“Oh, like us?”

“MMhm.” 

“Where from, then?”

“Don’t know. Probably got glassed.”

That catches them off guard. That was the part of the Spartan program that wasn’t shown in the propaganda. “What do you mean you don’t—”  _ “That’s bullshit, dude, you gotta remember where you came from,” South pouts across the table but Connie has that knowing look in her eye, she  _ knows _ , she knows what they did to you, and she’s frowning, “Give it up, South—” _

“Memory went bad. Don’t remember anything before the Covenant.” 

“Oh…” The squad goes silent. Andersmith actually looks towards you for a moment and you suspect everyone is finding some kind of tragedy in your shit memory. 

“That sucks.” Barone says at last. It’s blunt enough that it gets an annoyed hiss from Fabbri, but you don’t mind. 

You do think about it for a moment, clipping your datapad back to your thigh. Really, you don’t think you’d like to remember anything before the Covenant, before the doctors took you off the ice after you went brain dead, before life was the singular purpose of trying to win whatever wars were happening, whether they were galactic or mental. It’s not that unfortunate that you don’t remember it at all.

You simply grunt and leave it up to the rest of your squad to interpret. 

They avoid the subject for the rest of the week. 

They do learn you like candy, though. 


	4. On the Field

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maine gets shot again.

Your seventh week, you’re deployed on your first field assignment. You and the rest of Blue Squad, sans Andersmith, are sent out with Felix. He’s the one that drives up to a cave and guides you all the rest of the way through one of Chorus’ many cave systems with his power armor lights. He’s the superior officer of this operation. 

The cave opens onto a ridge that is only a foot wider than you are overlooking an assembly of prefab structures arranged just a few meters from the gaping hole of a nearby quarry. A bird flares its wings when you all emerge. Felix retrieves a knife and throws it, the blade plunging into the creature’s bright blue breast and sending it onto its back with a dying whine like a falling ship. Your stomach lurches but your feet remain planted on the ground. 

Felix creeps over and picks it up. He retrieves his knife from the bird’s chest and cleans it off on the back, smearing red over the flared orange plumage. Satisfied, Felix throws it to Vass. Her arm snaps up and she catches it by the neck, taking a moment to analyze it before she hands it to Fabbri. She cringes at it, but holds it, her weapons still remaining clipped to her armor. 

“Fuckin birds, nature’s security alarm. Least now we can have a fresh lunch.” Felix comments, sheathing his knife. “That bird’s not toxic, is it?” 

You glance at Fabbri who analyzes it and then shrugs. “It’s probably edible. I’d have to ask one of the wildlife kids back at HQ.” 

“Yeah. Alright, Blue Squad. We’re here to steal their shit, blow the generators and COM tower, and then book the fuck out before they can kill any of us.”

You growl. Felix’s helmet tilts towards you. “What is it?” 

You send a message out on the team COMfreq, which has temporarily looped in Felix. (Fabbri showed you when she learned you didn’t know how to access it) 

‘What about the rest? They can head back for reinforcement’

“That’s the reason I’m here. But feel free to make my job easier and blow the heads off any Feds ya see, alrighty? Have fun and all that, you guys could use it. Okay, here’s what we’re doing.”

Felix sends Belmonte, Vass, and Barone up the ridge to get a better view. Fabbri is left at the opening of the cave, serving as the RTO and scout with the sniper rifle. Due to Chorus’ problem with COMs, every squad has someone with a variation of RTO training. Fabbri mentioned once during a patrol that she used to operate her highschool news COM channel.

Felix has you follow him into the caves to get to a lower position where he could get better access to the targets. 

“Y’know this is essentially a test run, right?” Felix asks as you walk.

“Hmmm?” 

“I mean, Hine’s down to throw you at the Feds full force, have you wreck their shit and get this war over with, but she and Kimball wanna see how you can handle a smaller scale assignment like this. Just to make sure you’re the real deal. And also that you don’t, say, get a whole platoon killed.”

_ Oh. _ Keep walking and pretend you don’t think about how long you’d survive taking on a platoon of Feds. 

“Dude, that’s  _ good _ . Maybe she’ll promote you to sergeant.”

You make a disbelieving grunt, peering at Felix. 

“Nah, dude, I think she would. Maybe you could work your way up to Lieutenant or Captain. We’d either have to gain like a whole other colony’s worth of people or lose a shit-ton of men to do that first, though.”

You huff.

“I have no idea what you just said, but I’m pretty sure that was something rude.” 

Slash two fingers across your faceplate, the smiling sign. Felix makes a little snarking noise. “Oh, ha ha. Felix to Fabbri, can you read?”

“Yup. Coming in a bit fuzzy, but almost as good as the HQ’s COMs, so I say we get on with it.”

“Hey, Maine, Felix pissin’ you off, yet?” Belmonte’s voice comes in over the COMs, filtered through the static but still recognizable.

You grunt an affirmative, because Felix channels the persona of an Inner Colony asshole and also keeps calling you a Spartan, so, yeah, he kinda pisses you off. More as a person than what he says, though that also has a hand. 

“Careful, Felix. He could probably bust your skull. Then we’d be out a merc.” 

Felix does shuffle an inch or two away from you, even as he says. “Nah, I think he’s a bit more well behaved than that.”

“Didn’t you find him in handcuffs?”

“That’s a good point.” Vass adds, the slightest hint of a smile in her flat tone of voice that you somehow find appealing to listen to.

Felix goes quiet, shuffles another three inches away. Belmonte is surely grinning on the other end of the line, though she probably can’t see Felix, and it warms your chest because scaring Felix is ten times funnier than ignoring what he says. 

“Okay, guys, they’ll be hitting lunch break soon, so just keep that in mind.” Felix points out, turning a corner and throwing up a hand to stop you going past him. There’s the shape of two Fed soldiers standing at the entryway. 

“We’re gonna blow their shit sky high while they’re on lunch? Isn’t that kinda rude?”

“Yeah, well, the Covvies never had the manners to do it to us, so we’re not gonna either.” You blink at Felix before you recall that Felix is ex-UNSC that may or may not have shot his commanding officer. “That’s war.” He clips his rifle to his back, pulling out a knife. He glances at you.

_ Know how to use a knife? _ He sends directly to you. Nod your head. He nods back, turning to his target. He hands you the machete-like survival knives that seem to be quite popular among the New Republic. You haven’t gotten one yet, mainly to discourage hand to hand combat. At least you suspect that’s why you haven’t gotten one yet. 

He holds out a hand, points his thumb to himself. On his mark. You nod. He slowly extends each finger in a countdown.  _ One. Two. Three. Go. _

He lunges forward, but you’re one step faster, and you sink the survival knife through the neck of the Fed in front of you, your other arm hooking around their chest so they don’t fall. Blood spews out, the gargling last breath of the Fed the only thing that he manages. His gun drops to the grass and his hands spasm, trying to pull the knife from his throat, but instead weakly clawing at air. 

You can feel the muscle spasms through his chest, feel as the air and life floods out of him in your grip, at the end of the knife in your hand. The heat of his blood leaks through to your hands. 

Felix sinks his knife into the back of his Fed’s neck, pulls away the guy’s gun before he drops forward into the grass like an armored ragdoll. He looks at you, even through the visor you can tell he’s making some kind of face.

You haven’t released your Fed yet.

You pull the knife back out and carefully lower the Fed to the ground. Felix tilts his head at you and you realize you haven’t gotten up. Quickly, you straighten up and sheith your knife. 

“You good?” He asks, even as he hooks his arms under the Fed and drags him further up into the cave so they won’t be spotted. He doesn’t sound concerned for you, though. You follow his example and haul your Fed up to the one Felix drops and leave him there. 

Following that, you and the rest of Blue Squad wait, until most of the guarding soldiers disappear at the sound of their lunch bell. Not all of them, of course, but enough to be quick and quiet in your tasks.

Stealth was never your thing. Not during the War, not during Freelancer, and still not now. But at least now you’re not being shot down in an ordinance pod. 

Felix takes out the soldier standing by one of the generator buildings with a burst from his suppressed rifle. “Vass, Belmonte, I need you two to start taking out the guys by the storage building, alright? Be quick about it. Barone, you watch their back. Me and Maine are gonna go take out their COM tower.” 

“Won’t that clue them in?” Fabbri asks, as you unclip your rifle and bring it up to bear. 

“Not if they’re dead first. We’ll go for their generator, next.” Felix crouches and moves forward, quickly, and you follow close behind. 200-something pounds of muscle is hard to make light, especially in armor, but Felix doesn’t suggest you crawl to keep the cover as you duck between two buildings, thick with vine plants. 

He raises his rifle again, two suppressed bursts taking out the nearest pair of soldiers. 

You sneak through the slightly skewed arrangement of the structures. The vines don’t snap under your feet, they squish, like wet rubber, and it makes you less concerned about them even though the camp is full of them. 

You pause, just outside a tertiary storage structure, and Felix’s boots crunch on rock. He freezes up, swears under his breath, and he slowly moves for his knife. 

One soldier peers around the corner. “Hey-!” You swipe for his helmet, your hand glancing off the weird, smooth side of his helmet instead of hooking into anything. The soldier staggers and you quickly put the barrel of your rifle to his exposed side and send two bursts of lead into his gut. 

He hits the ground with a wet gasp. Felix, once again, drives his knife into the back of the neck. He tilts his visor towards you. “You gotta kill ‘em quick on jobs like this.” He doesn’t entirely sound pleased with that bit of information despite the fact he’s the one giving it, as he turns and books it to the backside of a secondary generator building. The COM tower was right next to it, likely powered entirely by said generator.

‘Blow it up?’ You send over the channel. Felix pauses, checking around the sides of the building through his rifle sights.

“Hey, Vass, Belmonte, are you at the central storage building?”

“Yessir. We found a map. There’s a motor pool nearby.”

“A motor pool?”

“Yup. Permission to steal one of the warthogs to haul the goods?”

“It’ll be pretty goddamn hard to get them out of camp, but yeah. Permission granted. Make sure no one spots you. Me and Maine are gonna set charges in the COM tower’s generator.”

Felix quickly stalks to the door, which slides open at hs detected presence, you right behind him. There’s two armored forms, their armor accented with dark blue, lingering at the monitors and keypads. They turn at the sound of the door. Felix fires off his rifle. 

“Alright, now we just gotta set the charges.” Felix hands you a few packs of explosives. “Strap that to whatever shit looks important. I’m gonna shut this tower down.” Felix heads back out, the automatic door shutting behind him, enclosing you inside the generator room. 

Your feet clang, echoing inside the tiny metal box, ( _ negative space of Alpha Alpha Alpha _ ) occupied only by the low rumble of the generator and the scraping of armor on grate.

You stomp on the outstretched hand of the armored man before his other can reach his holstered pistol. The crunch vibrates through the glove and you can feel the shift under your boot as the man yelps, pained.

“OW! Fuck, fuck, please-” You stoop down, grabbing the man by his shoulder pauldron and dragging him upright. He’s bleeding from his back, the red running in rivulets down the back of his armor and dripping down his thighs. You can hear the wet rasping on the inside of the helmet. “Don’t- don’t kill me-” a wet gasp “please, I don’t- I don’t want to die-” 

You growl, pulling the guy’s gun from his holster and fitting it to the underside of his helmet. He paws weakly. “No, no, no, please-” 

Crespi _ , his entire squad, helmet blown in, bleeding to death, arms broken beyond fixing— kill him kill him, acid rising in your throat, tasting purple, burning plasma stabbed through your left lung—  _

A single bullet pulps the guy’s brain inside his helmet, blood spraying out onto your glove and stolen pistol. You drop him to the grated floor with his pistol. Take a step back, Maine. Take a second to breathe, Maine. 

You pick up the explosive packs and walk over to the loud rumbling machinery at the back of the room, strapping two of them on the weakest point you see. The third is strapped to the computers. 

Quickly, you leave behind the two corpses and join Felix outside the COM tower, wiping blood off his knife on one of the vine plants. “Set the charges?” You nod. “Good. Let’s go set up the rest in the main generator building. Belmonte, status on the supplies?”

“Successfully hijacked a warthog, working on clearing the area. We got ‘bout fifteen minutes before lunch ends.”

“That’s all we need. We’ll meet up with you at the storage building.”

“Got it.” 

You and Felix go about, darting about between generator buildings, picking off the soldiers. You keep at it from a distance. Your bloody glove, it itches on your hand, the itch digging into the bone of your hand. You technically have an itchy trigger finger. Carolina would find it funny. 

The visor of a Fed crumples and shatters under the short burst of your rifle in time with the sudden visceral sensation stabbing from your throat to your stomach. The armor seemingly flickers colors before you.  _ No _ . It’s not Carolina, it’s  _ not _ ,  _ breathe _ , you didn’t shoot her—  _ you didn’t shoot her.  _

You don’t need to steady yourself, you just have to remind yourself  _ not  _ to puke in your goddamn helmet. 

The central generator is big and still well guarded. Felix resorts to running up and stabbing, you stick to your rifle even though it’s a tad bit slower. You hear Felix mutter “I’m a fuckin’ ninja, bitch” over the COMfreq, just before you take out another Fed. “Hey, Maine, keep the Feds out.” 

“Hrggg?” You glance around the corner, note the automatic doors are still shut, and that you can’t see the black-orange contrast of Felix’s armor anymore. 

“I’m in the building. Setting the main charges.”

You ready yourself, looking up and down the ways towards the door, to ensure no Feds appear. You glance at the Feds on the ground and notice that they have different accent colors on their armor. Green. 

You have maybe a minute to think about what that means, whether it refers to rank or just platoon, like in the Republic, before Felix reappears through a side door. “Charges are set. Heading to the central storage buildin’ right now.” 

“You better hurry, Felix. They’re gonna be coming back.”

“Yeah, we should. I have no idea how big of a blast these things are gonna make.” 

“Comforting.” 

You and Felix hoof it to the storage building, your connection to Fabbri going a little spotty, as you make it there. 

Two warthogs are parked in front of the storage building, rumbling quietly, the F.A.C symbol (identical spire shapes bracketing what you assume is Chorus or her sun) painted on the sides. 

Vass, Barone, and Belmonte are hauling small supplies crates out of the front door, jammed open by something you don’t see, and dumping them in the back. Barone waves at the sight of you. 

“Keep loading, we gotta get out fast.” Felix warns, clipping his rifle to his weapons mount on the back. “The moment their lunch break ends, we gotta be gone. I’m setting off the charges the moment we’re out of range.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know the range.”

“I’ve got a rough guess. Math was never my thing, though. So… Move quickly.” 

“Comforting.” Vass repeats, jamming a crate into the back. You clip your weapon and run to pick up one of the heavier crates from inside the building. You move quickly and you can carry heavier things. Within two minutes, the first warthog is loaded to as much as it can get. 

“Okay. Vass, Barone, get in the warthog and let’s get the fuck out of here.” Felix says, hopping into the driver’s seat. “Fabbri, start heading out to our ride.” 

“Maine, Belmonte, you got five minutes.” You don’t stagger. You never had missions like this before, so there’s nothing to spring at you, latch onto your brain and ache. Belmonte does stumble, cause she tries to carry heavier things, but you keep moving.

“Two minutes, guys. You need to go.”

“One more crate-” Belmonte hisses through her teeth as she jams another crate into the back.

“Belmonte, you and Maine need to get the fuck out of there, or Felix’ll blow the charge with you in there.”

“What about the rest?”

“Doesn’t fuckin’ matter, get out!” Fabbri snaps over the line. You jam a final heavy crate into the back before Belmonte quickly wrangles restraints to keep them in the back. You hop into the passenger side, Belmonte hops into the driver’s side.

“Okay, okay, we’re heading out-”

“Shit, they’re moving.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be heading back?”

“Not until you guys left.”

“Fabbri, those caves are gonna collapse under the blasts, head out.  _ Now. _ ”

“Okay, okay-”

There’s the crack of an automatic rifle in the air, succeeded by several pings against the metal shell of the warthog. You lurch, turning to see a Fed, rifle up to bear, pointing at you. 

“There’s rebels out here!” He shouts, likely trying the COM channels Felix turned off. 

The warthog lurches, hard, under your boots as Belmonte stomps down on the acceleration. A handful of rifle bursts ping off the crates. You grab onto the frame and the dashboard as the warthog lurches and screeches over the terrain, taking a sharp turn as Belmonte quickly made the way out of the camp. 

There’s a sudden yelp and you realize she caught a bullet in the side of her helmet. “Fuck, I’m alright!” She yells, though you don’t trust that very much. 

‘Making our way out’ you send to Felix. ‘How long til blast?’ 

You got 90.

You assume that means seconds. You turn to look at Belmonte and snarl over the direct COM line you can establish with her. 

She seems to understand that as  _ get the fuck out of here _ , and she pushes hard on the acceleration. 

“I hope they gassed this thing up ‘fore we took it.” She hisses over the line. 

You hear high pitched rumbling join the warthog’s, and you lean out to see three Mongooses , all being driven by Fed soldiers. 

“Hey, rebels, give that back! Return our supplies at once!” You unclip your rifle, though it takes some contorting to retrieve it. You unbuckle yourself as a burst of rifles ping off the thick roll bar.

“Maine, hey, hey, what the fuck— MAINE!” Belmonte clearly disapproves as you lean against the roll bar and start firing your shots at the Mongooses as they start gaining on you. 

You snarl through your helmet. They probably can’t hear you over the vehicles, but you keep firing. Of course, only a handful of bursts, and your rifle clicks empty. You pull out the empty magazine and chuck it at the head Mongoose. It bounces off the Fed’s helmet, sending a little zig zag through his driving pattern. He loudly swears, but you can hardly hear him over the click of a full magazine in your rifle. 

His windshield shatters under two bursts, he jerks back from his ducked down position in a gut-punch reaction that gives you access to fire into the exposed bodysuit over his gut in the moment before the Mongoose loses a meter or so of ground. 

Blood sprays out into the air behind him, misting the remaining fragments of windshield, and he veers away. 

“YOU FUCKIN CAVE RATS!” One of the Feds screech. You clutch for a grenade, depress the arming trigger, and chuck it at the Mongoose with said Fed. It explodes at the tail end under the Mongoose, sending it swerving over a vine plant and crushing its driver head over heels. 

“Holy shit, Maine!” Belmonte shouts over the COM line. 

You hear the blasts of exploding generators before you see it. Flares of red and yellow and orange, spewing out shrapnel that either burns up or falls quickly. Your fingers dig into the frame, tense, and the metal squeaks under your grip. 

“He blew the fuckin’ charges- fuck- holy shit- what does it look like?” Belmonte asks, swerving to the side. You hold steady, turn to look at her. 

‘Like an explosion’ You send her. 

“Ha- fuckin ha, Maine!” She sounds like she’s smiling. 

A bullet buries itself in your gauntlet, a sharp ache of pain spreading outward from the source. Your rifle clatters into a space in the back of the warthog and you make a stunned noise. The Mongoose is right on your tail, the Fed driving it screaming and swearing, driving one handed, a rifle in the other. The gun is thumping against his shoulder, somehow remaining in his hand. His finger does not leave the trigger. That explains his shit aim. 

It isn’t shit enough that it misses you, though. 

Pain, sharp and wet and hard, tears through your left arm as a spray of bullets shred through muscle, skin, and bodysuit. Blood sprays onto the warthog, a handful of bullets shot wide are caught in your chestplate and the force sends your back against the windshield frame. 

“Shit! Maine, Maine, you okay?”

Wet and hot, blood pours down your arm, droplets flying away with the speed of the travelling warthog, running faster than the blood and adrenaline in your veins. The pain travels up through the marrow of your bones, crackling through to your jaw and right into your fuckin teeth, down to the roots. 

Your lungs feel like they’ve been kicked empty, but you can still fucking shoot. You grab tight hold of the roll bar with your left arm and heave yourself back up and rest your good arm. Your heart pumps wildly in your chest, practically dumping out blood from the wound in your arm. 

“Fuckin’ hang on, Maine, shit- Felix? Felix can you fuckin hear me? Maine’s been shot!”

You pull your pistol from your thigh, your gloves slick with blood, and you line up the sights with the driver. The Fed’s rifle clicks empty and he angrily tosses it, losing it among the crates in the back of the warthog. His visor crumples under two exact shots. He drops off the back of his warthog, leaving a bright path of scarlet in the green. 

Your hand aches, it’s taking all your fucking energy to fight the heavy lead sensation, crawling up to your tricep, and you manage to not drop your pistol out the window, instead dropping it into the warthog’s foot space. 

“Hang on, Maine. Hang on.” Belmonte repeats. 

  
  


Felix calls you a ‘lucky bastard’ at the sight of you holding your wounded arm with your right hand. Vass ties one of the wide straps for the warthog crates around the injury, just to minimize blood flow. Sleep calls to you, the adrenaline dropping and leaving your left arm feeling kinda numb and shaky. 

You slip from the passenger seat of the warthog into a dream.

Washington is walking towards you, armor chipped and worn, and he’s pointing a rifle at you. His helmet is beaten, the visor cracked and crusted with blood and snow. 

You can’t get up. 

Your left arm is frozen into the snow, absorbed in the white frost, no matter how you pull, you can’t get it out- fuck- move _ , move, _ you extend your available hand out in front of you. Stop, Washington,  _ stop-  _

All that comes out of your mouth is a pained, gargling croak. 

Cold. It’s fucking cold. You’re armorless. You’re dressed in NR fatigues. You can’t feel your legs. 

“I knew it would come to this, Meta.” Washington growls, stoppin right at your feet, lining up the sights of his rifle with your head. “But I can’t let you take Epsilon.”

No, no,  _ no _ , you’re not the Meta- fuck- wave your arm, kick, flail,  _ anything—  _ you’re not the Meta. That’s all you want to say, I’m not the Meta, _ I’m not the Meta _ , Wash— _ Wash, please— _

“Please.” Comes out in a painful rasp, tearing up the raw flesh in your throat, and you gag on it. Your eyes burn and you gag on the fact you can’t speak. 

An AI flashes over Washington’s shoulder. A glint of light blue, holding a sniper rifle, staring you down- Alpha. No _ , Epsilon, Epsilon, _ your free hand reaches for him, fingers curl, warmth spawning in your chest—  _ fixed. We can be fixed. Epsilon, please, Epsilon, it’s us—  _ Epsilon winces. He can sense the graveyard in your skull, Alpha, the ghost of his routines- 

What happens when we integrate him?

It will hurt. But he’ll know. He’ll tell us  _ everything _ , fill the negative space, inform us what exactly- it will hurt to know. But we  _ have  _ to know. We have to- the AI urge, the driving need- oxygen, rampancy,  _ it’ll drive me to rampancy _

_ Me or you? No, try again- me or him? No— us? Us or him. _

“Shoot him, Wash.”  _ Wash _ . Wash, it feels like something has stabbed into your chest, it hurts, it hurts, _ he doesn’t want us— Epsilon, please! _

Your heart drops, the cold sinks in through the back of your skull, like an icicle stabbed through your head, infecting your brain.  _ They  _ crackle along the synapses of your brain, along your neural network, there is no partition, you are all trapped in the same mass of gray tissue, you don’t know where the interface ends and where brain begins—

A burst from the rifle pulps your brain, implants, and skull into the snow.

  
  


Your eyes flash open to bright lights. The muscles in your torso violently spasm as your body goes through a moment of deciphering whether it’s alive or dead. No, no—  _ Wash—  _ some kind of pained wail-gasp tears out from behind your teeth. Fire licks up from your upper left arm, washing through the muscles of your chest. You jerk, trying to pull your arm to your chest.

“Hey, Maine- hey-” A hand, covered in some kind of thin glove, presses against your forehead, leaving a wet imprint. Your breath is coming in and out ragged and hard. It burns. “Hold still, Maine. You’re okay.” 

Armando. It’s Armando.

Armando is tightly wrapping your stitched-up arm in bandages, your bodysuit rolled down to reveal your bruised chest and years of older scars. You slump back into the curve of the bed, steadying your breathing. Washington is dead. You are not. Don’t fucking mix that up. 

Hine is standing in the corner, arms folded, watching you with an expression you can’t read. Your armor is scattered on a visitor’s chair. 

“You were lucky. Damage is all tissue, you can recover most of that over time.” Maybe more, what with your war-intended design. 

Once you’re properly patched up, Hine gestures Armando out with the bob of her head and steps to the base of your bed. 

“How do you feel?”

You grumble in what roughly would translate to ‘like shit’ because your arm is burning and your chest aches. 

“Well, you did pretty good for your first assignment on the field. Aside from getting shot, of course.” You nod. “You’re the only one on your squad that was severely injured.” 

You gargle what may sound like Belmonte. 

“Don’t worry. Belmonte’s just got a bruise. Vass may have pulled something moving a heavy crate, but they’re still working on it.” 

You look at your arm, point to it, then point to the clock hanging on the wall across from your bed. Hine takes a moment to translate, then answers.

“Armando estimates you’ll be in recovery for a while. ‘Bout a month before we can put you on any active field deployments.” 

Acid burns at the back of your throat, tasting vaguely purple, and Hine doesn’t seem to notice the sharp curves in your scowl. 

You don’t want to wait a month. You  _ just  _ got put out onto the field, you don’t  _ want  _ to wait. 

But you do, anyway. 


	5. Recovery

Your seventh week on Chorus, following the assignment, you try Chorusan bird for the first time.

Vass is promoted to Blue Squad’s sergeant, which she informs you of the day after the assignment when she brings you a cut of the bird ( _ Conine,  _ you learn it’s called) Felix killed on the assignment, which Fabbri remembered to bring with her before the caves collapsed. 

It’s the freshest thing you’ve eaten in months. She’s also saved her own share. 

“It felt kinda wrong to eat it without you.” She explains. You nod, humming your thanks, as you bite into it. It isn’t super flavorful, but it’s fresh, nicely cooked meat. “My mom used to show me how to cook it, for when she was gone. Never could cook it the same way, though.” 

So this is what Vass’ childhood memories probably consist of, you note. Cooking mystery meat of the weak alone and eating it alone. You’ve picked up that most of the soldiers here had parents working in the farms, mines, or factories. It gave Fabbri time to pick up tech, specifically communications, and for Barone to learn how to dye his hair on his own, and for Belmonte to get tattoos. 

You, of course, can’t relate to this, because you’ve been absent of a parental figure your entire life. 

When you note Vass staring into space, you make an inquisitive growl. “Oh.” She blinks at you. “Sorry, I was just thinking ‘bout what I’d do if the war ended tomorrow. Barone asked me that the other day. It’s been bugging me since.” This is probably the most you’ve heard from Vass in one sitting. 

You nod, swallowing the last of your bird. “What would you do, we won the war tomorrow?”

You think on that, pick up your datapad which Vass was nice enough to bring you along with the meat. 

“What about you?”

Vass shrugs. “Sandwich business, maybe. Everyone here would be happy to just eat anything that isn’t old MREs. The farms would have to get back into business, first.”

“Maybe I could move to one of the farms, work there.”

“Alone?”

You pause, think about it. Being alone is the last thing you’d want in a rural farm like what you’ve seen on Chorus. The quiet and the loneliness would eat away at you in ways that you never want to experience again.

When the war ends, you doubt you’ll be able to get off Chorus and live a life outside of it anyway. And, honestly, you don’t want to. Everyone here knows you as Maine, not the Meta, not the Freelancer, not the mindless UNSC soldier, not the crazy pain in the UNSC’s ass, just Corporal Maine. You like the people on Chorus. 

_ “Hey, Wash, what’re you gonna do after the war ends?” York asks, leaning on the back of the lounge room couch while Wash strokes Connie’s hair, her head in his lap.  _

_ He purses his lips, thinks for a moment, then answers. “Adopt a cat.” _

_ “Adopt a cat?” Connie mumbles, raising an eyebrow since Wash stopped stroking her hair. Wash thinks for a moment, which upsets Connie. _

_ “No. Three cats.” _

_ “Three?” York sounds disbelieving.  _

_ “Three’s the magic number. Three cats. Just enough to manage and not too many to worry about space.” He turns towards you, Connie’s feet pushing against your knee. “What do you think about that, Maine?” _

There’s a slight burn in the corners of your eyes. You blink it away, staring at the datapad. “No.” You type out. “I’d adopt a cat.” 

Vass blinks at you, as if she can’t believe you’d want a cat. Or maybe she doesn’t think you know how to take care of a cat (you don’t). Then her lips quirk up at one end. “That sounds nice.” 

It’s another day before you’re given a sling to keep your left arm in while you heal and instructions to keep off that side while you sleep. You’re allowed to go back to the barracks, so long as you come see Armando frequent enough to ensure you’re properly recovering and haven’t aggravated your injury, which she strongly assumes you will. 

* * *

During your ninth week on Chorus, first week of recovery, Jensen offers to braid your hair for the first time. 

Jensen offers you this when she sees you struggling to put your hair back and get it out of your face.

You can’t raise your left arm and you’re pretty sure Armando will kill you if she gets word you took your arm out of your sling to do something as stupid as fix your hair. You would also like to shave your face, but you have neither the experience nor the materials to do that. Based on the few glimpses you take of your face in the mirror, it makes you look older. 

You kinda stare at Jensen, when she asks if you’d like her to braid your hair. Florida had a braid. He was also the creepiest fucker in Freelancer. 

When your only answer to Jensen is a confused growl, she explains; “It’s just- a braid is probably easier for you to keep than a ponytail. Also you just… You could leave it up while you recover.” 

You decide to let Jensen braid your hair, though it feels a bit odd to sit on a tiny weapons crate and let this soldier you hardly know to mess with your hair. She combs all of your hair back, a repetitive motion that sends some kind of warmth down your spine. You don’t have any memories associated with people messing with your hair, because only until recently, you didn’t have hair or you didn’t have any friendlies to mess with it. 

She combs all your hair back with bare hands, then divides them into three, and then starts pulling and weaving them. You don’t know how it looks to braid hair, you can’t see her hands work, but about ten minutes later, you have a braid that reaches somewhere between your shoulders. You can make the estimate it’ll be a lot faster to tuck it into your helmet the way it is now.

You humm your thanks to Jensen, who flushes and stumbles over her lisp as she replies with “oh, no problem. I-if you want, I can do it again whenever you have time.” 

You suspect Jensen enjoys playing with your hair. 

You don’t mind this at all.

* * *

Towards the end of your recovery, your second month on Chorus, Andersmith (everyone calls him Smith) is promoted to Lieutenant and you experience your first ‘promotion party.’

You wouldn’t classify it as a party, as it only consists of your squad in aempty half-collapsed mining portal utilized for storage, but Belmonte somehow gets alcohol involved and everyone learns you can’t get drunk and you don’t like alcohol (“That fuckin sucks,” Barone informs you, parroting a memory of York enough to make you sick). This also coincides with the first time you get a taste of Chorus candy, which Barone hands you in an old little mint tin, labeled _ Cade. B _ . 

The candy is formed in glossy balls, tasting sweet and cherry-esque. They crack under your teeth and the inside is full of something citrus in flavor and caramel in texture. 

You make a sort of ‘How the fuck did you get this’ kind of noise, which you’ve made at Belmonte when she showed you the tattoo of the Chorusan Eagle, wingtips reaching the curves of her shoulder (a vivid reminder of South, tattoos curving from her knuckles to her throat), and when Bitters somehow got his hand on a pack of cigars that make you think ‘sergeant.’ 

You actually bring yourself to pat Smith on the back with your good arm and give him the lightest of smiles that in no way matches the one that stretches wide across his dark face. 

It’s been a long while since you last congratulated anyone in any variation of a promotion. The Leaderboard never counted and you never cared about it. But you don’t have a leaderboard anymore, you have proper ranks, and you aren’t competing to be the best.

You’re working to end the war. Directly 


	6. Popping Fed Skulls and Shoulders

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maine meets Locus

By the time you’re put back on the field, you’ve been on Chorus for nearly three months. You have to make up for the damage to the muscles in your arm, which is a long process of light workouts, minor participation in training, and constant check ups from Armando to ensure your arm is recovering correctly, but you push for clearance to join the field every chance you see Kimball.

A Spartan is useless if said Spartan is stuck with an arm in a cast somewhere far away from the fight, as Felix adequately points out with only a bit more profanity. 

Your boosted immune system and the replenished medical supplies do speed up your recovery, but muscle takes time to recover and your right arm is gonna be your better arm for a long time to come. Your fourth month on Chorus is mainly occupied by quick and quiet in-and-out tasks that barely involve exchanged fire. Things like scouting and ‘counter-scouting’ (putting bullets in the heads of invasive Fed patrols from a safe distance). 

By your fifth month of Chorus, you finally convince Hine (with the aid of Felix) to send you back on the more battle-risky assignments. Thus, it is your fifth month on Chorus when you meet Locus for the first time. 

You’ve heard about Locus in the way people would hear about a disappeared (as in ONI) colleague or the glassing of a planet. In snips of whispered conversations and reports (because you needed something to read in the days where you could hardly go anywhere), not in casual conversation, purely because Locus is the biggest fear of any New Republic soldier and there’s the general sense he can track you down if you give him the beacon of his own name. The boogeyman of your people, as it were (when did you start thinking of them as  _ your people _ ?).

And you meet him on an assignment. 

You are sent as reinforcements with all of Lt. Andersmith’s platoon for another platoon that was sent out to try and set up some COM relay towers to improve New Republic communications across the central continent, which would lead to better organized assaults on other F.A.C outposts. Though this wasn’t the first time it’s been attempted, it is a good idea. Except for the fact that three platoons were sent out and only one had set up enough communication relays to call for help.

Either the other two were fine or they’d been wiped out before they could do anything.

According to Vass, this is the biggest operation Hine has run in a while, though not the biggest she ever ran. Her biggest operation resulted in the complete destruction of Fort Euphon and an entire Fed battalion in the eastern region.

You discover the hard way that the structures at the tops of the cliffs are occupied by Fed soldiers, despite the battle waging on the distant ground below. 

Your squad splits off and attacks from the flank near the water, another squad charges in from the other side, and the rest of the platoon serves as a distraction that manages to take out a handful of the first responding guards. 

Vass leads the charge. You split off with Belmonte when the corridor forks, running into a duo of Feds at the end of the hallway who heard your loud approach. You take out a grenade, throw it at an angle so it bounces into the turn they came from, and watch as the Fed nearest the turn is blown into his partner, sans most of his arm, and the two collapse while blood sprays from a screaming source just out of view.

You book it over to the duo of Feds, putting bullets in their throats before you reach the turn, and put a bullet in the first piece of bloody Fed armor you see when you turn. You don’t stop to analyze the damage, you just keep firing until you’ve dropped the entire small squad of Feds inside the hall.

It takes ten minutes before you run into the other squad and then clear out the Feds up front (who were already getting clued in to their comrades’ demise over radio) so that the rest of the platoon can sweep the facility and then use the facility’s COM tower to contact those at the bottom of the cliffs.

A voice comes in over the channels. “Federal Army of Chorus, this is Lieutenant Blair, issuing an immediate retreat.” It isn’t Lieutenant Blair, who you presume was located in the radio room just commandeered, it’s another RTO named Kovachek. The Feds wouldn’t know that, though, especially with the artificially induced static. “Retreat at once. That’s an order.” 

There’s a pause over the COM channel as you join up with the rest of the squad inside the building atrium in front of Lt. Andersmith, Belmonte bouncing on her feet and Vass standing at parade rest, awaiting orders. The Fed bodies are being dragged into a neat pile in the corner by two members of the other squad. There are two big windows that you can stand near to peer at the situation below.

The platoon is pinned against a river the width of several warthogs, sourced from the central jungle, and a deep chasm that the river empties into. The foliage here is sparser than the junge’s, though you place the blame on the mining operation that clearly took place here once long ago for that.

The platoon is hiding among the metal structures and the tall wild grass, the well-organized force of Feds cutting the platoon off from the cliffs riddled with mining portals that likely emptied into the cave systems that the rebels favored to get around. 

A pause. “Acknowledged, Lieutenant.” Comes, presumably, from the second Lt. down on the ground. 

“They’ve ceased fire.” Kovachek announces over the platoon radio. “Some of them appear to be retreating, sir.” Andersmith nods, somehow communicating the solemn attitude of a man awaiting a death sentence. 

The ground shakes beneath your boots, a split second delay between that and the heavy rumble of an explosion outside that draws the muscles in your back taut.

“They didn’t buy it, Lieutenant! They’re blowing up the mining portals and caves!” Kovachek announces into the COM channel. “They’ve destroyed a majority of our access routes on the northern end.” 

“We’re gonna either have to wipe out all the Feds or clear out enough to get the platoon out of here.” Stuber, Andersmith’s solemn second lieutenant, announces. “I don’t think we have enough guns to do either, sir.”

Andersmith nods, pressing a finger to the jaw of his helmet, analyzing the situation from the windows. “Stow the negative talk, Stuber. There’s gotta be some strategy we can utilize.”

“Sir, there’s no getting across the chasm or the river.”

“Sergeant Yu, do you have an estimate of much of the platoon is still alive?”

The answer is crackly, despite Yu and his squad being located on the roof now. “I count fifteen heads from up here, sir. Not sure how many are under cover.” 

“Give me the optimistic guess.”

“Half of the original platoon, sir.” Andersmith’s posture shifts, unhappy. That would be somewhere around twenty-five soldiers, unless this was one of the New Republic’s smaller platoons, which were more abundant than their big ones. 

“Number of Feds, Yu?” Stuber asks, tapping a foot on the grated floor. 

“My guess, lieutenant? One large platoon with several ‘hogs full of ordinance. Way more than we got. Unless you’ve got a pod full of rocket launchers or something, I don’t know how we’re gonna handle that.”

You growl, the sound thundering in your chest, and Andersmith turns to look at you. You bring your rifle across your chest, flick off the safety, and growl again. There’s the dawning realization that they have a supersoldier on this platoon. And you’re kinda pissed about being sidelined for a month.

“Okay. Platoon, how many explosives do we got?” Andersmith asks, an idea forming. 

The plan devised sends you and Sergeant Yu’s squad down into the battlefield through the mining structure elevator, which you have to climb down the guide rails and run through some tiny maintenance shafts, but it places you behind the Feds but away from the blast zone of Andersmith’s plan, which is dropping grenades from the remaining mining portals near the Feds.

Blue Squad and Yu’s Squad separate, you going for the squad on the edge of the Fed assortment, Yu going for the Fed squad position at the next maintenance exit. 

Vass rolls a grenade out from the maintenance exit behind a block of rubble under a Fed at a turret set up. It bumps his boot, he looks down, and it explodes.

He goes flying, ammo and turret scattering into flaming bits of metal, sprayed in a fine mist of blood and charred armor. This gets the attention of the surrounding Feds, who turn their rifles to the source of the explosion, confused. You and Vass stick the barrels of your rifles through the exit and spray lead. 

There’s screams and a few fired shots, but very quickly you both wipe out the squad of Feds in time with the screaming of the next squad of Feds over. 

You press your right shoulder into the chunk of rubble and push, opening the exit for your squad. You quickly rise up, pointing your rifle at the prone forms on the ground. There’s a lot of rubble from the explosions set off on the cliff face, which provides cover. 

You put a burst into the head of the first Fed you see twitch. You don’t have any variation of imaging on your visor, so you only rely on the first motion you see.

“Yu squad, all clear.” The sergeant announces over the COM. Vass repeats that Blue Squad is also clear. 

And then the Feds realize they’ve been snuck up on. 

Bullets ping off rubble and you drop to cover with the rest of Blue Squad. Belmonte leans over the rubble, exchanging fire with the Feds. You take a glance, fire off a few shots that you don’t see hit, and note that so was Yu’s squad. 

“Blue Squad, move up!” Vass announces, wiggling her way up through rubble and around Fed corpses to join the Yu squad under cover. Blood sprays out of one Fed’s chest under the sights of your rifle. You proceed quickly through cover with Belmonte at your side, peppering Fed bodies with rifle fire, only stopping to reload your rifle. 

_ “Vass, get the platoon out of here. Yu, provide suppressing fire.”  _ Andersmith announces over the COM.

“Yessir,” a moment later, one of Yu’s squadmates’ body spasmed, thrown to the back by a sudden round of machine gun fire that caught them square in the chest. Yu’s other squadmate wailed, firing off at the source.

  
  


“Fuck, Rosen is down, sir!” Yu shouts into the COM while his surviving squadmates screamed abuse at the Feds. You blink, stunned, at the quickly dying soldier. The body spasmed, blood pumping out onto the ground. You can hear the gargling choke through the COM, and you can practically see the life vanish from their eyes as they go limp 

Belmonte thumps her rifle against your bad shoulder and you’re once again aware of the bullets flying overhead.

“Move, Maine!” She points ahead, redirecting your attention to Vass, Barone, and Fabbri, who were moving ahead. They weaved through rubble and the staggered generator and staff housings that dotted the area between the cliffs and the river. 

You charge after them, catching up quickly. A bullet buries itself into the lower back of your chest armor, it barely sways your gravity. 

“Lieutenant Kader! Come in Lieutenant Kader!” Fabbri called, trying to contact the rebel platoon.

“This is Sergeant Sheryl Baumer.” Comes through instead. “Identify yourself.”   
  


“This is Corporal Valerie Fabbri of Fifth Blue Squad. We’re here to rescue you. Where is Lieutenant Kader?”

“Dead, ma’am. A sniper took him out.”

“A sniper?”

“We didn’t find any snipers.” Belmonte muttered while Barone leaned around the corner to take shots at, presumably, some nearing Feds.

A grunt came in over the radio. “Yes, ma’am. It’s just my troops and Third Yellow Squad right now.” 

“Are you the highest ranked in the Platoon?”

“No, ma’am. Chief Antal is still here.”

“Can you contact him? We need to evacuate your platoon ASAP, before the Feds get their reinforcements.”

“Yes ma’am. I’ll gather the survivors to your location.”

“Right. We’re south of your position. If any of your warthogs still work, try and salvage your ordinance.” 

“Understood, ma’am. Expect us in two minutes, max.”

“That’s all we need. Sergeant Yu, status?” Vass tuned in to the sergeant, who was still alive. 

“The Feds are backing up. They’ve got about two squads left, they’ve most likely called reinforcements. Corporal Rosen is KIA, Private Hirsch is wounded. We can’t push much more without revealing our hand, Vass.”

“Understood. Maintain suppressing fire, I’ll give you the all clear when we got the platoon through the maintenance exits.” 

It takes a few seconds over two minutes for the remains of the platoon to gather at your location next to the generator housings near the river. From there, it’s just a quick trip back to the maintenance exits across the stretch of housing and dirt.

One kid keeps mumbling and thanking you over and over, despite the fact you haven’t fucking gotten him out of here yet. 

One of the surviving squad members is a small woman, who can barely walk on one leg, which looked to be held together entirely by torn up bodysuit and the remains of her armor. It was a miracle she was still alive at all, though judging by her agonized breathing and the fact her armor was barely hanging onto the burn wounds on her side, it was a desperate fight. 

She can’t keep up with the rest of the squad, so you offer to serve as a support for her to lean on, but you’re taller than her and still faster than her. 

So you do the next best thing and hook an arm under her thighs and pull her up to your chest with your right arm. Her arms loop around your neck—  _ “onwards, Maine!” Connie grins, bare heel digging into your abdomen _ — and you use your left arm to hold your rifle while you run. Your aim is  _ abysmal _ , but Yu’s squad is providing enough suppressing fire to keep the needed exchange from you at a minimum. 

You have to throw your rifle back on its mount at your back in order to carry her with both hands, holding her body to your chest as you duck into the maintenance tunnel and keep at a steady pace at the rear of the collection of Blue Squad and the platoon.

“Sergeant Yu, we have got the survivors, you are clear to retreat.”

“Understood!” 

A minute later, the crunch of boots on the grainy soil start behind you, Yu and his remaining squad on your tail. You don’t bother to look back, because at the moment this woman’s pained, rasping breaths might as well be all you can hear.

The woman has to hook herself around your back when you start climbing guide rails, but you don’t mind. You do double check every chance you have that she can keep hanging on. You don’t know how long your left arm could handle her or your weight, so you would either find a different way up or leave her to climb by herself. 

The building that houses the defunct elevator is only meter out from the central communication structure, which you assume is because it requires its own power generator, connected at the back, which has been overgrown by plants and beyond use. 

“This is Sergeant Vass of Blue Team with the platoon survivors.” Vass announced once they were exiting the building, utilizing sight-line COMs. “Sergeant Baumer is enroute with a ‘hog full of ordinance, don’t fire on her.”

“Sitrep on the platoon?” Andersmith’s voice crackled over the channel. 

“Third Yellow Squad and Sarge Baumer are the only survivors, sir.”

“Damn.” 

“Lieutenant, I think Fed reinforcements are coming.” Kovachek interrupted. You kept walking, the soldier back in your arms. There was a single medic on this assignment, she could assist the soldier you were currently carrying. 

“Why do you think so, Corporal?”

“Because our perimeter scouts aren’t responding, sir.” A beat, a muffled beep. “ _ Oh _ . Lieutenant, we have an incoming transmission.”

“Let it in. Play it over the channel.”

“Uh, yes sir.” A moment later, barely enough time to wonder who was transmitting, Felix’s voice crackled over the channel.

“You guys better be ready for extraction.”

“Felix, how’re you getting-”

“Not important, I’m bringing a squad to your location now. Prepare for extraction, very fuckin’  _ hot  _ extraction. And make sure all your men are accounted for.” That had never been good news in Freelancer. It draws your guts up into knots at the base of your spine with the knowledge it wouldn’t be good news now, either. 

“Why?” 

Two members of Yellow Squad brought their weapons up to bear and pointed them upwards, towards the door to the central communication structure from the elevator. The paint on the door shimmered, distorted around curves the door didn’t naturally possess. 

“Their reinforcement is fucking  _ Locus _ .”

The shimmering shape resolved into two armored Feds, with black accents, their guns up and pointing at you. You and your squad. Their fingers squeeze the triggers. 

“Locus, we have visual.” You hear one whisper into their radio. 

“Feds on the roof! Feds on the roof!” Yells an unnamed sergeant. 

You spin and dive, right as the first shots crack out and are succeeded by the entire survivng squad firing off their rifles, protecting the wounded soldier with your own body. There’s distant cracks and yelling further off, other Fed soldiers firing off their weapons and likely taking out a chunk of the platoon. 

“Maine, give Walken your sidearm!” Vass orders and you straighten back up to see one dead Yellow and one guy dripping blood from the gut, tended to by Chief Antal. The Fed’s helmet on the left is burst outwards and spilling the pureed contents of his helmet onto the concrete. His partner is slumped onto the ground, gun at his feet, his chest armor blown open by all the rounds it took. His breathing is more a wheeze, wet with blood that you can’t see.

You blink at Vass. You don’t know which soldier is Walken. 

The wounded soldier takes your sidearm when you hesitate to give it to her, so you suppose she’s Walken. She can’t stand up on her own, but you do to turn to Belmonte. 

‘Locus?’ You send to Belmonte over the TEAMCOM. 

“Fed Merc.” She answers. “After we got Felix, they got him. He’s a scary motherfucker.”

“He wiped out an entire NR platoon during the battle of Tona.” Barone adds. “My guess is, the assholes who just shot Rudi-” the dead Yellow “are his personal squad.”

You glance at Rudi. You’re pretty sure he’s a friend of Barone’s, since Rudi is not a surname you’re ever heard of, but it is a given name— 

“Lieutenant Andersmith, what’s the situation?” 

“I think they’ve got us pinned, Vass. We’re gonna try and get out. Can you clear out the front?”

“Yessir.” 

A bullet buries itself into your right pauldron and you whirl around, rifle up, in time to catch a flickering shadow on top of the elevator housing. You fire at the distortion, spraying blood from what you suppose is the leg. You fire again, aiming higher, and the camo vanishes to reveal a bloody Fed just in time to watch him drop from the housing.

“Good job, Maine.” Vass turns to the survivors of the battle and beckons towards the front of the building. “You heard the man, we gotta clear out the front. Walken, you and Matthews keep this entry clear.” Matthews gives a vigorous nod. Walken holds up her pistol and bounces the barrel off the front of her helmet in a sort of salute.

“What about Felix?” 

“We can’t wait for him.” Vass says, shouldering her rifle and taking the lead once again. “Be ready. Assume a full squad.”

You, personally, would assume an entire platoon because that seems to be the stroke of luck that the NR’s hit in the past few days. However, you don’t inform Vass of this, because that’d be rude and you don’t despise the optimism. 

There’s four arranged soldiers out front, backs to each other, weapons pointed ahead of them in something like a four pointed star. 

That still leaves about four soldiers, maybe more if this Locus just doesn’t give a shit about the proper organization of squads, but you’re gonna try and think good things because there’s a limited number of people on Chorus and an even further limited number of Fed soldiers, not an indefinable number of Insurrectionists, waiting to gut you and your squad for the insignia on your uniform. 

You just gotta gut ‘em, first.

You get Vass’ attention, tapping your gun with a hand, pointing to yourself, and then pointing to the Feds. Everyone else can clearly read the tension and you wonder if they can see the vaguely menacing look that’s creeping onto your face behind your visor.

There is nothing wrong with the fact you are vividly plotting out the deaths of the Feds out front with extra attention paid to the way their blood will splatter on the concrete where the grass hasn’t fully taken it back and the sound their skulls will make when you bash your rifle through the visors. 

Vass pointedly swivels her helmet, looking at you, the Feds, you, the Feds, judging the state of your arm most likely, back to the Feds. Time is at a crawl, Andersmith doesn’t have enough time for Vass to decide throwing the only Spartan on Chorus at the enemy is or is not a good idea, Stuber doesn’t have time, Walken is probably gonna lose her entire leg if you wait too long and it gets infected in the unsafe environment of an unmaintained mining facility. Really, no one should be out here.

Maybe you should let the Feds have it and hope whatever radiation or toxic plant adaptations kill them before they become a problem. It’d be more time-effective than waiting for Vass to recount the soldiers behind her and guess their combat effectiveness.

Vass typically does not spend this much time making choices. You suppose she doesn’t want you to get shot again. But why have a weapon if you’re not going to use it? 

You pick up your rifle and decide to make a run for it. You push off from the corner of the communication building front and bring your rifle up to fire as you run. You have about a half-second before they realize someone is there, another two seconds before they fully process it’s a rebel who’s shooting at them, and by then they’re already firing and one of them has bullets in his chest piece. You fail to hit muscle, but you are going somewhere upwards of twenty-five miles an hour. 

You duck into a clunky roll, still unfamiliar with the movement in this armor model, and you slide on dirty concrete behind a NR warthog. 

You dig fingers into any groove or mass of plant to pull yourself to a stop, snap the head off a three-foot jungle weed in the process, and bring your rifle up to empty the rest of your magazine at the mass of Feds who are picking holes out of the concrete with their own weapons. Another bullet finds your pauldron, a second hits momentum in the top mass of electronics and metal at the top of your helmet. 

Tech sparks and sends a vibration of static into the neural implants at the base of your skull, it makes you want to tear the helmet off your fucking head as if the damage would conjure some kind of hostile entity in your brain, it sends a narrow knife of absolute terror down the cord of your spine.

The taste of acid burns at the back of your throat and your push off from behind the warthog, passing over the warthog, and running at the Feds while you empty your rifle at them until it clicks empty.

The Feds aren’t fast enough, they shoot in the general direction of your chest, the largest target, but by the time they’ve got their bullets flying there, you’re ducking and unsheathing your Chorusan knife and stabbing it into the first flash of black bodysuit you see and ripping it out with your forward momentum, the serrated edge causing more damage on exit.

You crash into the Fed across, the other screaming (still alive, you struck inner thigh), and the barrel of his rifle jabs into your gut before it goes flying, unfired and the Fed clatters to the concrete with your knife in his throat and your hand on his visor. 

You roll to the side to avoid the other Feds’ opening more fire, turn and put your momentum into your punch. The Fed you aim for staggers, having witnessed his friend’s fate, and you grab him by the shoulder pauldron (it’s difficult to grip) when your punch misses his throat. The momentum nearly tears the piece of armor from the body, and you practically throw him into his injured friend. 

The two hit the ground and the survivor fires at you. You duck once again and snatch up a rifle, using it as a projectile since that’s faster than using it properly, and it thunks hard against the Fed. It gives you a second of an opening and you surge forward, clutch the Fed by the throat, and shove him down into the concrete. 

There’s the harsh crack of helmet on concrete, the guy isn’t dead, and you brace one hand on his chest and the other on the helmet.

The snap is loud to your ears, no matter how muffled it is by the bodysuit, and you rise up from the corpse of the Fed. The two who remain are sprawled on the ground, the one you threw stunned, the other clutching his sidearm— 

Barone’s rifle cracks with an extended burst that sprays Fed blood onto the concrete. It quickly mixes into reddish mud. Barone standing in the open, rifle held, and Vass right behind him with a hand extended. 

You don’t know if he’s grinning over his good shot or not, so you focus on grabbing the stunned Fed and pressing your knee into his chest. The pressure receives a pained noise and you push the Fed’s head back, unclip the seal of his helmet and push it off with all the grace you believe the bastard deserves. 

Your helmet radio buzzes and spits incoherent chunks of someone talking at you. You ignore it.

He blinks, stunned, and his facial features aren’t that quite different from Armando. You half want to ask his name. But then you remember that Chorus was close-knit, still somewhat is, and the gene pool’s gone unmixed for a couple decades. Decide you’ll ask Armando later. 

You snarl into his face, shake him until his eyes focus onto you, and you see the terror swirling there. His throat fits almost entirely in the curve between your thumb and your pointer.

Your radio spits out more white noise.

You can’t ask him anything with words. When he doesn’t answer your snarl, you press the toe of your boot against the exposed glove of his hand. You push, push, cartilage and bone shifting under your boot, snarl again, jab a finger at his chest and then form an L with your hands and point to the roof.  _ Where is Locus? _

“I-I don’t know- I don’t know what you’re saying!” He cries, the muscles of his arm going tense as he tries and fails to pull his hand free before you shatter it. 

You make an L, hold it in his face. He whines again, not understanding what you say, adrenaline and fear likely slowing down what little cognitive functions he has. 

Press down on his hand and feel the reverberation of something snapping under your boot. He screams.

“Maine!” Vass snaps, her voice coming in loud and clear, her helmet no longer over her head, now in the curve of her hand. “Get off him, right now!” Her short-cropped black hair is stuck up, contrasting her light brown skin tone.

You stare at her for a moment, stunned. You make a movement with your hand, a pull-down motion that should encourage her to put her fucking helmet back on before somebody shoots her. 

“Corporal! Step away from the Fed, that is an order!” Your radio doesn’t work. Fuck, you’re radio doesn’t work, she can’t communicate with you with her helmet on.

You leap back from the Fed like it burned your hands to touch him, acid seeping into your mouth,  _ Agent that is a direct— _

Vass approaches you quickly, tucking her helmet under her arm, and stops to stare at the crying Fed on the concrete who you kinda wanna shut up, kinda wanna run away from. 

“What the fuck was that?”

You tap your helmet. You can’t communicate with her. Vass looks pissed and kind of upset, she pushes her bangs out of her face and takes in a breath before looking at the Fed.

“How many more of you are there?” She asks, scowling. 

“I- I don’t have-” You stomp your boot near his stomach. You vividly imagine how long a death crushing his intestines will lead to, how bloody a death it would be, how many rebels like Rudi and Rosen and Crespi he’s shot down.

The Fed squeals at the threat. “I- Two more! Two more!” You make the L with your hand, hold it up to Vass. Maybe you should learn sign language, more rebels could understand that then your vague hand gestures. 

Vass looks back down to the Fed. “Where’s Locus?”

“W-what?”

“Where’s Locus? Is he with the other two? Is he in the building?” She points her rifle at the Fed’s face. His eyes are bulging out of their sockets. 

“He- I dunno- Locus is—”   
  


There's a sharp crack of a sniper that echoes out over the open space of the building front. Your instinct has you grabbing Vass, shielding her as you duck to the ground, similar to how you protected Walken. 

No bullet punctures your insides or catches in your armor. 

There’s the clatter of a rifle succeeded by an armored body and a high pitched wail from Belmonte that takes you a stunned moment to translate to ‘Barone.’

You look up and regret it so, so, so fucking much. 

Barone’s collapsed to the ground on his back, fragments of his visor sprayed out at his feet with a vibrant blood spray. Belmonte rushes to his side and lifts his head. 

You don’t need access to team biostats to know that Barone just took a bullet to the forehead. 

No… No, no, Barone can’t— 

_ Childish grin under thick, short bleached dreads— “I’d kill for some funnel cake,” _

Dead. Dead, fucking  _ dead _ , on the ground.  _ No. _

You release your grip on Vass and she wrenches her helmet on, rifle brought up in the direction of whoever shot Barone. A second shot rings out and she hits the ground spewing blood onto the concrete. 

You lunge for her, panic rising in your throat, burning, utilizing the oxygen in your lungs to set them on  _ fire _ , Vass, Vass, no,  _ Vass— _

Something like a choking wail is what comes out of you. It hurts, claws tears from your eyes, and it echoes in your helmet. 

“Stop,” echoes out over the empty space, your hand on Vass’s bloody side, your heart hammering behind your eyeballs. “Step away from the rebel.”

You hesitate. You remain frozen, hand on Vass, eyes burning, “Step away from the rebel or I will shoot.” 

You slowly rise up to your full height, eyes focusing on nothing but Vass, unmoving, blood spreading out on the ground. Step away. You nearly stumble over a Fed corpse. 

You hear the heavy thumps of power armored boots on concrete and you turn around in time to see a man in power armor shimmer into view, like a heat mirage.

He’s tall, nearly your height, dressing in all black armor with green accents, and a sniper rifle in his hands. His helmet looks like a skull that was half-melted and sanded down. You have no idea where to look to glare into his eyes. 

Locus. 

“Raise your hands.” When you don’t do as he asks, he nods his head towards Belmonte. “Do as I say or I’ll shoot the rest of your squad. Now.”

_ Belmonte, head caved in the side, spewing blood and grey matter— Andersmith, Yu, you can’t let him—  _ The images are there and gone, digging a pit in your stomach. 

You raise your hands. “Take off your helmet.” You take off your helmet, hesitate only a half second before you lift it off your head, the radio still spewing nonsensical static. Your braid rolls out from the gap in the back of your helmet, thumping against your back. There’s a momentary pause, as if this Locus can’t process you’d have a braid, then he snarls, “on your knees, drop the helmet.”

You drop the helmet, it clatters loudly on the concrete. You slowly drop to a knee, half expecting Locus to kick you into the ground when it takes you a moment before you’re fully resting on your knees, hands above your head. For a moment you linger there, half-expecting Locus to blow your brains out, executioner style.

“What’s your name?”

You snarl, that shredded angry sound, glancing back at Barone. Locus hums, annoyed, and steps forward, pointing the barrel of his sniper into your face. His eyes catch on the long white scar crossing over the bridge of your nose, then he prods your throat with the end of his weapon. 

“Can’t talk?” 

You slowly shake your head, not wanting Locus to shoot you. Your heart is still hammering behind your eyeballs, where it decisively shouldn’t fucking be. 

“That’s fine. My employer prefers it if you can’t.” You assume the Fed general. Locus’ words, vague as they are, spawn a sick feeling in your gut that correlates with the unpleasant and just as vague imagery of what is going to happen to you. 

Locus brings up the butt of his sniper, and you recognize his full intent to beat you over the head with it. 

You duck the moment he tries, latching onto his legs with your hands and jerking hard.

Locus is heavy, an extra eighty or so pounds of armor added on to what is likely a lot of muscle, but you can benchpress a fucking warthog if you feel like it, so you pull and Locus crashes to the ground in a loud cacophany of equipment and armor. 

You grab hold of the sniper and attempt wrench it out of his hands before he can fire it off, because he clearly has the kind of training that doesn’t let him drop a weapon when he’s knocked down.

Locus kicks you in the gut, the power behind it wrenching your fingers off the sniper and sending you stumbling backwards where you nearly trip over the blood of the dead Fed.

Locus brings his sniper up to aim and you dive behind the still living Fed, heaving him up so that the bullet punches through his chest before it can go through you. You heave him up, using him as a shield as you run at Locus, throwing the heavy weight at him when you’re close enough.

Locus ducks into a roll to the side, righting himself to fire another shot, and you run. You duck low and tear the Chorusan knife out of the other dead Fed’s throat as you pass before throwing yourself into a roll that would put you behind Locus. Blood wicks off the end of the knife as you remove it.

Locus is fast on his feet, but not fast enough to get too far away by the time you’re behind him, slashing wildly. 

He whirls around, using his sniper as an impromptu shield, and you grab it with your free hand and stab at his hands until you can wrench it from them.

You toss the sniper far behind you and lash out with your knife again, aiming for the flexible shift of bodysuit instead of armor. 

You miss, you miss, your knife sparks off armor, and Locus latches a hand around your flailing wrist.  _ Connie, grinning, flicking that knife over her fingers “Lemme show you something—” _

You shove, hard, at Locus, but he barely shifts on the concrete and pain sparks up the skin of your wrist as Locus’ grip grows tighter and tighter like a vice. His other hand presses into your chest. 

You snarl, baring your teeth in an example of animal rage, the boiling water in your veins, and your head snaps forward. 

Pain stabs through the half-dome of your forehead, Locus grunts, and you take advantage to shift the knife in your fingers, clumsy, shove heavy against the man as you drive the blade down with your fingers.

Locus grunts, angrier, as the knife drives through bodysuit and sinks into the flesh of his wrist. 

You lurch to the side of his wounded wrist, wrenching your arm free, his hand sliding from your chest and failing to grasp any other hold on your armor, and propel yourself off of him into a roll for the first glint of a gun you see, knife mag clipped by the blade to your thigh where your sidearm should be. 

You snatch the rifle, still wet with Fed blood, and whirl around with the butt against your shoulder and the barrel pointed at Locus.

Except Locus is gone. 

Your breath catches behind your teeth, sweat dripping down your face, the sun is warm on the back of your head.

You scan for a shimmer of Locus’ camouflaged shape, your eyes momentarily darting to Barone’s corpse to assure yourself that the rest of your squad is still alive.

Belmonte is no longer there. You assume they took advantage of your distraction to get the hell away. You hope that they made it. 

Vass is still sprawled out on the concrete, blood likely going cold even under Chorus’ sun.

You snarl. You wish you could speak words, just to lure Locus back at you with a string of creative curses that South—  _ “you goddamn cranberry fucknut!—”  _ had taught you over the years. 

Locus’ arms hook around your throat from behind, forcing you to either choke on a closed windpipe or stand up. He’s not as tall as you, you’re stuck nearly on one knee to keep at his level, and the gun remains in your hand.

“You’re lucky you’re wanted alive. Drop the gun.” He snarls in your ear, removing one arm to hook his hand in a fistful of hair at the base of your braid. You tense, hissing between your teeth as he tugs and pain jolts up your spine, going staticy at the base of your implants.

He tightens his grip, pulling out a few hairs with weirdly loud snaps as he snarls, “Drop it,  _ soldier _ .” Metal, you taste metal and electronics and gunpowder, “That’s an  _ order _ .” 

That stirs an unpleasant sensation in your gut, in the chunk of your memories that you don’t think are _ yours _ , but not nearly as much as his armored knuckles brushing against the metal of your implant. 

It’s like a lightning bolt to the gut, a maglev train of pure white sensation that is in no way good up to the center of your brain. That gut sensation of fire and _ fuck fuck fuck fuck, **no** _ — travels through your legs and your chest and the muscle of your heart swells, fucking explodes into adrenaline and terror, rage, you taste  _ blood _ —

The rifle clatters to the ground and you grab Locus by the arms—

He crashes on his back in front of you, the muscle of your left bicep is on fucking fire and so is your scalp (his fist is clenched around torn out hair) as you lunge at him.

Locus ducks out of your way, you turn and snarl, bright teeth and gums, you still taste electronics, you’re gonna tear him limb from  _ fucking limb, “do it—” _

An armored fist cracks out against the center of your face, sending you sprawling, pain blooming outward from where your teeth sink into the meat of your own mouth. Your armor scrapes loudly against the concrete and you scrabble to right yourself before Locus can pounce again. Pain is blooming through your jaw and you spit out grit you somehow got in your mouth.

A bloody chunk of tooth, bright pink,  _ pinks  _ against the concrete at your feet. You blink at it, stunned, because no one has ever knocked a tooth in your skull  _ loose—  _

Locus kicks you in the left side of the skull, sending you onto your side, the armor plates or treads (you're unsure_ tearing skin from your left temple and sending out a thin spray of blood. 

You clatter ungraciously onto the ground, smearing someone’s blood on the ground, and for a moment all you hear is angry ringing. You reach a shaky hand towards the side of your skull, but Locus is on you, heaving you to your feet by the meat of your left shoulder—

His fingers dig sharply into your fresh scarring in your shoulder, and it  _ hurts _ . 

The dull ache sharpens at the point of contact, pricking and shooting up to your neck, against the nerves of your throat, and you grunt. Locus hears you and shoves you down to a knee, digging his fingers in harder, and you hiss out your anger and pain and thin blood spray through teeth, your eyes barely able to keep him in view at the angle he’s pushing you. 

That coppery taste is in the back of your throat, you claw at the concrete, he steps on your wrist and grabs your left arm with his free hand at the elbow. He digs his thumb into the sensitive point in the underside of your elbow and you growl (it's verging on a pained groan) louder. 

“Stand down and surrender now, or I’ll beat you into it.” Locus threatens, applying pressure to your wrist. You tilt your head back, despite the pain-induced spots flashing at the edge of your vision, and glare up at Locus’ smooth, visor-less helmet. 

You spit a mouthful of saliva and blood into the center of the giant green X in his face and pull your lips back and mouth a very slow, very  _ clear  _ ‘fuck you.’

“That’s how it’s going to be, then.” Locus says, annoyed, and pulls on your shoulder, digging his fingers into where the bullets entered and exited muscle. He twists your forearm, pain sparking at the joint as it’s pushed to the very edge of its mobility. 

Something pops, a warning, and pain pulses hot and heavy in your veins. You’re on the verge of screaming, the pain welling up as sounds in your lungs, pricking desperately at your mangled vocal chords for release of the manic energy of panic and rage. 

You’re no martial artist, Maine. 

But you are one goddamn tolerant cockroach of a man. 

You steel yourself, shift your feet under you, pain sparking white at the corners of your vision, and you  _ move _ .

You push upwards, the momentum from the strength of your legs more than that of your arms. The treads of Locus’ boots scrape but you tear your wrist out from under him, scratching skin through bodysuit, and whirl around even as he does not release your left arm. 

There’s a resounding crack-pop from your left shoulder and for a moment all you can see out of your left eye is the wild, white flash of agonizing pain that lets loose a scream through your ragged throat as you whip your free hand around and drive the elbow,  _ hard _ , into the back of Locus’ neck.

He grunts, you drive a knee into his gut, kick him hard to get his hand to release your left arm. 

He pulls you with him, a direct line of pain from where his hand has locked around your left wrist up to your chest and brain, but you push through it. You push through that goddamn pain and use the bounce back of Locus at the end of your wrist like a bungee cord, your armored elbow snapping against the side of his helmet, sending him in a stumble that nearly drops him on the concrete. 

You’re pretty sure you feel the clack of Locus’ teeth, but there’s no way to prove that and the only thing you can do is try and return the favor and dislocate Locus’ arm. 

Maybe shatter the joint into tons of pieces so the man can never raise a sniper to your squad mates again. 

You take the moment of stars in Locus’ eyes to unsheathe your Chorusan knife, trying to decide the most painful and effective place to put it in before the man uses your left arm like a tether and pulls you to him so he can presumably knock a full set of teeth out instead of just a piece. 

You shift your head, the blow instead glancing off your nose— you hear a crack, pain and the smell of wet metal and pain fills your nose as your head knocks back, largely overcompensation so Locus doesn’t realize you’re stabbing a hole in his right kidney. He grabs your wrist, the tip of the knife snagged in the bodysuit—

The burst of a rifle cracks at Locus’ feet, not hitting anything, but surprising him into trying to track the source. The momentary lapse is all you need to shove your hand forward. 

The sound is wet and loud as knife slides past bodysuit and into the meat of the mercenary’s side, and Locus sharply exhales what is most likely a Spanish curse. 

You take a little pleasure in this, in knowing the heat and wetness pumping out onto your glove is from Locus, and twist the blade. It twinges your wrist, but Locus makes a guttural noise of pain, torn to pieces in his throat to try and withhold the pleasure of removing a chunk of muscle and (hopefully) important organs. He doesn’t succeed. That burning rage and pleasure in your chest  _ roars _ . 

You don’t know if it’s a manic grin on your face, bloody and pink, or a grimace of pain and exertion.

_ “Agent Maine, isn’t that the soldier from the freeway? The one that shot you in the throat?” Your gargling assurance. It is. That’s the fucker. Same gun, too. “I thought so. Sic ‘em.” _

The dome of Locus’ helmet crunches against your skull.

You release him, your eyes momentarily disconnecting from your brain as you stumble away, knife handle no longer in your hand. You don’t hear it clatter, as you bring a bloodied glove to your forehead, and take a moment to process the damage. There is no new crater in the space of your forehead, so that’s good. 

You blink, just in time to watch Locus vanish, blood outlining his side even as he runs away, before recalling that there’s someone behind you with a gun.

You spin around, your brain sloshing wildly and once again, disconnecting from the data feed of your eyes for a moment, before it all resolves back into the sight of Vass.

Vass, sitting up, rifle propped up on her knees, her entire body shaking with the exertion. 

Not dead.

You stumble to her side, drop to your knees and reach for the large scarlet stain on her side, some small desperate noise coming out from the deepest part of your lungs.

“Holy fucking shit!” 

You whirl your head around, just in time to see Felix running for you, gun hanging absently from one hand. He pumps a fist, despite the bloody disaster that is your current state. “That was fucking awesome!”

He saw?

You rise up to your feet, that residual rage hitching quick rides through your fast-moving blood vessels, pumping in and out of your heart. You momentarily feel like you’re gonna throw up, and you wouldn’t mind doing it on Felix’s boots just to piss him off because he  _ watched _ . 

Felix slows to a stop and takes a half step backwards as you stomp forward and jab a bloody finger against his chest and snarl. The vibrant red smears on the front. Blood is dripping out of your mouth, out of your nose, and you want to punch him in the visor. 

He watched. You don’t know how much he’s watched, whether he saw Barone’s brains get blown out or not, whether he saw Vass get shot or not, but he was there and you may be a bloody mess with a dislocated left arm, but you’re tall and fuckin' pissed so he should really explain himself. 

“Hey, dude, we’re here to rescue you. But, it looks like you did that for yourself, holy shit, man, you just  _ beat  _ Locus!”

You nod your head toward Barone. Felix’s enthusiasm slips a little, but not enough, as he simply shrugs and brings his rifle up to bear.

“Yeah, that happens. You’re lucky it wasn’t the whole squad. Felix to Andersmith, the cavalry's here. Point me at the guys you wanna fuck up. Don’t worry, I’ll drop enough C4 to level a cliff on their asses.”

You really wanna hit Felix over the head. You raise a hand for a moment before Vass loudly coughs blood and announces, “hey, still bleeding over here!” 

You return to her side, analyzing the wound, scowling at your empty IFAK and unable to demand Vass gets any treatment. The color has seeped out of her skin and you can’t even fucking pick her up with your dislocated arm. There’s the hint of tremors, quivering under the skin of your back like snakes, the warning of how hard you’re gonna come down from the endorphins, adrenaline, and rage and how much of a mess you’ll be after.

Vass does get medical care, after the loud crack-boom of Felix dropping a huge chunk of cliff on the remaining Feds. You watch a medic patch her up in the warthog when Felix offers to put your shoulder back in place. Seeing as Felix likely has the most experience, you allow him to. 

“Okay, on three." You nod, he hums. "One— ” He lies, pops your shoulder back in with a harsh shove before ‘One’ is even fully out of his mouth. Your arm burns, bruising at the elbow, and you flex it in a half-veiled threat to bust Felix’s face in. He takes a step back, though it may just be because Kimball is coming over the radio. Or Hine. It’s a woman in a position of power in the NR screaming at him loud enough to get through the shell of his helmet, but not enough for you to properly discern. 

You sit down next to Vass, who’s been put on a drip you helpfully hold in place, and you hold her close with an arm on her opposing side as if Locus is gonna come back and shoot her again. Felix perches at the tail end of the car, gun in hand, and he watches the sullen posture of Belmonte and Fabbri and you. Barone is placed in another warthog that Baumer salvaged with the ordinance, along with the bodies of the dead yellow and whatever other bodies they have that were recoverable. Walken and a couple other Yellow Squad members are crammed into the warthog with you. 

Belmonte’s hands and armor are sticky with Barone’s blood. You note the dog tags she tries and fails to wipe the blood off of in her hands, wish you could offer her some kind of help or see her face. Everyone else can see yours. It feels kinda unfair. 

“You lost your knife.” Felix points out. He saw that, surely. You don’t have the ability to ask how long he stood in the foliage, watching you get your ass kicked by some dick in power armor. 

You blow a bloody raspberry in his direction and he recoils. “Dude,  _ gross _ .” There’s a light noise from Belmonte, like a wisp of a laugh, choked by a grief-strangled throat.

You flash him a smug, ‘suck it the fuck up’ smile, stained in your own blood which dribbles out past your lip and lands on your knee.

Based on his posture, Felix looks ready to jump out of the warthog. 


	7. The Blue Spartan

You receive your first nickname from the Chorusans later that night, after Armando’s berated you for getting a light concussion, dislocating your arm, and taking Locus on hand-to-hand and nearly dying. She berates Vass just as much for getting shot. — 

You catch her standing outside the infirmary, staring at a lighter, absently flicking it on and off even though the flame was hardly there, breathing heavy. You can recognize an ex-smoker, because South was an ex-smoker. She would steal Wyoming’s cigarette packs and—

_ “You fucker, if I see you smoke one more goddamn cig, I’m gonna punch a hole in your throat for you!”  _ The faded tinge of nicotine stains under the bright pink nail polish when they went without touch ups for too long. The logic of, _ If I can’t smoke to calm my nerves, you can’t either.  _ You didn’t like the smell, either, the same kind of way you didn’t like the taste of liquor. 

Some distant part of you yearns to take part in that again, even though you never had. Your stomach twists, that gag at the back of your throat as the phantom smell of cigarettes snakes into your senses.

You don’t ask Armando if she had a brother. You forget. You suspect the tears have something to do with the casualties on your side, but you don’t know and you walk past as if you didn’t see it but the too-long pause would have surely guaranteed Armando would have seen you if she was looking at anything but the lighter. 

You meet up with Belmonte, hunched over on a crate, relieved of her armor and Barone’s blood. At the sight of you, she straightens up and you see she’s writing with black permanent marker on her leg. You don’t know how she got it, but you don’t question her as you lean on your right side against the crate and she extends her leg to expose the row of names on her calf, typically hidden under the pant legs of her fatigues. You wonder if her other leg looks the same. 

_ Rudi Gehring 2537-2555 _ written over  _ Caderynn Barone 2538-2555 _ hook around at her ankle, over light scars against the joint. Some of the black marker has smudged off onto the back of her gray socks.

“I didn’t know the others names.” Her face is sullen, eyes glossy and only partially seeing, and her dreads are wild and tangled with each other. You blink at the other names, etched into Belmonte’s skin. They’re not the names of everyone that died on the battlefield today. The dates are close to each other, though. “I’m gonna ask Volleyball for some help with these.” She mumbles, absently, staring at the names. She glances at your face, notes you trying to puzzle out the pattern, completely glossing over what those dates genuinely mean, glossing over the quick math going on in the back of your head. 

“I used to go to school with most of them.” She rolls the pant leg up to her thigh, revealing  _ Jordan Belmonte 2530-2545 _ underneath  _ Salim Belmonte 2502-2542 _ and  _ Ava Belmonte 2509-2546  _ lined up in a list on her outer thigh a few centimeters away from the bend of her knee. Tears glisten in her eyes and you rest a big, calloused hand over hers, gently nudging her pant leg back over the names. It stops short above _ Caderynn Barone _ . She is warm, even in the growing chill, and you’re holding onto her hand to keep you both grounded here.

She’s made a memorial of herself.

You hesitantly reach for the stab scar on the left of your chest, the last thing Washington ever gave you, and suppose that’s the only memorial the man will ever get. 

After a few minutes standing there, hand on top of hers, in silence you wouldn’t define as amiable or awkward, not really thinking, no one really around to call you out, you both steel yourselves and head to the Mess to grab something to fill your hollow stomachs. The cold seems more pronounced against your hands. “Fabbri’s already waiting outside for us, I think.” Belmonte points out. Vass won’t be allowed to walk for a week at the least.

You don’t want to see the faces of the friends of the soldiers you failed to save today, reminders of the bodies left unrecovered at the edge of a river, maybe thrown in for all the fucks the Feds apparently give about respect for the dead. You don’t want to see them. But you have to eat and it wouldn’t do you any good to go unfed. 

The hollow feeling spreads from your chest to your stomach, so cold and aching that it somehow manages to threaten tears to your eyes, and Belmonte takes at least five steps away from the crate before she realizes she isn’t wearing her boot. 

Fabbri is, in fact, waiting outside for you, unarmored and just as hollow-looking as you feel. She pats you on your right shoulder, her touch lingering to give a gentle squeeze that twinges your left shoulder but rings as comfort, as warmth that pulses lazily through to your chest. Her eyes seem just as unseeing as yours, her hair only pulled halfway into braids of black, their typical style, and you suppose she must have been trying to wash out her hair completely before giving up. 

The lethargy dampness of grief can have Blue Squad for one night, you suppose, and don’t blame Fabbri for it. 

When you step into the mess, though, the world erupts into screaming and cheering and the metallic slam of cutlery and canteens on tables, for a moment you nearly go to cover your ears, your shoulders drawn taut at the sudden terror that sinks through the hollow of your insides and pools uselessly at the bottom.

Felix walks up, the only asshole in armor, and raises his hands like he’s praising some force above for you entering the mess, and he walks with that unmistakable swagger that makes you want to kick something in the teeth. Probably him, though your brain never gives you that detail in the gut sensations that send twitches of movement into the miscellaneous muscles of your legs.

Fantasizing about killing what is  _ supposed  _ to be your ally in the vivid detail of blood and force is one step either forwards or backwards you’re forcing yourself not to take. 

“Hey, there you guys are! I was just telling the guys about how you stabbed Locus in the fuckin’ gut.”

Kidney, you want to correct, then recognize that the blade did still get there and that’s the feat, not the detail of where it went. 

You grunt, tapping out, “I lost my knife.” on your datapad, cause your helmet is still wrecked and you’re too tired and hurt to walk around in armor right now. The datapad is a heavy weight in your hands.

Your skin is steadily darkening to its original light brown every time you spend free time unarmored in the camp, a shade closer to the naturally dark skin of the Chorusans, a shade further from the pale thing that never left the protective shell of armor or ship. 

Felix makes a noise, like you’re being funny, which you suppose you can come off as, and he gestures for you to join him at a table where he must have been telling the story. You grab food with your squad, settle down, legs hardly a centimeter from each other, and you listen to Felix tell the story.

Walken stops by, limping on a cane fashioned from a jungle branch, and she hands your pistol back to you. “Thanks for that. Killed a Fed from Locus’ squad before it could kill the LT.”

You nod, tap out a ‘no problem’ that’s barely heard as the mess hall erupts into more cheers as Felix reaches the climax of the fight which was that you got the upper hand on Locus and stabbed him, though he drags through this part of the story and you can recognize he wasn’t around when Locus showed up, based on the way he describes the story. The Matthews kid is settled next to Felix, and he repeatedly mentions that you were perfectly fine (if light bleeding, concussion, and dislocated shoulder is ‘fine’) after you took on a whole Fed black-ops squad.

You’re pretty sure it wasn’t a black-ops squad, but hey, it pumps everyone else up. 

“Vass shot at his feet.” You type out. “She distracted him.” Fabbri nods, absently biting down on an empty fork and hardly reacting to the painful sound of metal crunched between teeth, simply removing the fork from her mouth and settling it on top of her heated MRE. She stares at the brown goop you suppose is beans for a long moment, processing something, though you can only guess what. 

“Fuck yeah for the Blue Spartan!” Someone whoops after Felix puts some details of seeing a floating splash of blood and a Chorusan knife vanish into the jungle before anything could be done and you still fucking standing at the end of it, and all you do is blink

Your weird gurgle of confusion is suddenly overrun by someone smacking their hands on the table in time with the pauses in their words.

“Blue Spartan. Blue Spartan. Blue Spartan.” Voices pile in, forming up into a cloud of sound in the Mess, around you, with the synchronized banging of hands, cutlery, and drinks on the surface of tables. Belmonte’s voice suddenly joins in, she’s thumping her fists on the table and the glassiness in her eyes is gone. 

Fabbri looks confused. You echo the look. Somehow, though, the sound feels like it shoves the bones and muscles in your legs straight and your awkwardly rise up from the bench with your hands spread out on the table.

Felix is somehow behind you, you can’t hear him chanting even though his fist his pumping the air in time with the crowd, and he claps a heavy hand over your left shoulder. Pain, real and memory, pulses up where his fingers dig lightly into the divots of bullet scars, nerves raw and agitated from your earlier fight.

“Good fuckin’ job, Maine.” 

He doesn’t let go of your shoulder. You don’t know if he’s just testing to see how long he can go before you try and bite his fingers off (which you would absolutely do), or if he’s just forgotten 

It gnaws at your stomach lining, some kind of anxiety.

Fabbri joins the chanting.


	8. A Work-around

The start of your sixth month on Chorus, receive your first armor upgrade with the New Republic.

You need to be put back onto the field, the manic energy that was left in the wake of the emotional bulldozer known as fresh grief buzzing under your skin, similarly to the metaphorical bulldozer of the F.A.C’s silencing tactics leaving the buzzing manic crowd of angry kids and angry adults who just lost family members to the open maw of a broken bureaucracy.

(Hine does not attempt to hide her biases in her reports and you do not tolerate the idea she has fabricated a story to keep her going, though you have corroborated her reports with others in the NR database cause you’re not stupid)

Jensen comes to you with your fixed armor and your repaired helmet with a bounce in her step that tells you she’s excited. 

“I updated your helmet. Vass informed me you had some communication problems, during the mission,” judging on her tone and the fact she does not pause or hesitate to hand you the helmet despite the fact you brutalized an entire squad, she does not know the details of said communication problem. That is fine. “The helmets here aren’t meant to interface with implants, so I had to change some things.”

You don’t like the idea of anything interfacing with your implants, although a hostile entity spontaneously spawning from the programming of your helmet and then hopping to burn its way through the overgrown neural pathways that still give you headaches is an unrealistic (but not unfounded) concept. But it’s still there.

“You just need the helmet to work it.” She hands it to you, expecting you to put it on, and after staring into the dome where your head goes and, failing to see any menacing flicker of hologram particles composed with a kaleidoscope of colors, you put it on.

It fits snug as it did before, smells of plastic and fresh electronics prominent within it. A crackle of static pulses through your neural implant, like rubbing one’s hand on a balloon, and it doesn’t knock you off your feet with the nausea of poking your mental scars. There’s only the barest flicker in the corner of your eyes, and you’re blinking it away quickly. 

“Open the communication program.” Jensen, despite her lisp, does not seem willing to use the shortened versions of words everyone else does. “Type a message.”

You do, the interface running smoothly, as if it was without its spotty eye-tracking, and you remember it has that connection to your interface now. Not as smooth as when an AI can translate human brain activity to electronics. 

You decide to type out ‘What update did you add?’

“What update did you add?” Translates audibly out of the smooth shape on the jaw of your helmet, a helmet speaker, in a deep, electronic voice that sounds like a vague approximation of your growling sounds.

Your chest tightens, momentarily, and you suck in a startled breath. Jensen is grinning, jumping from foot to foot. 

“It worked!”

Hesitantly, you type out, “What is this?”

“I added a speaker and an extra piece to your COM program based on text-to-speech apps, like the one you use on your datapad. It's a lot clearer than having the entire army learn sign language." You do not know sign language. You should learn it, for future instances of broken helmets. "What do you think?”

You stare at her for a long moment, think back to the screaming Fed babbling  _ “I-I don’t know- I don’t know what you’re saying!” _

“Thank you.” That’s not a summation of what you think, you note. Jensen just smiles and bounces off to resume another project.


	9. Gonna Fight the Good Fight, Maybe Live a Long Life

Midway through the sixth month, you run into your first civilian setting on Chorus. A village. 

And you don’t like it at all. 

Lemle village was nestled behind a small wood of young, but tall, trees and had its back to a cluster of steep, rocky hills that had scaffolding and implied intents of mining before the civil war had set in and dismantled a large part of the overarching government and set the rest into the unsafe grip of martial law and state of emergency. 

There’s a path, worn down by heavy foot traffic and way too narrow to be a frequent vehicle destination. There’s the vague indention of the previous patrol’s warthog, which is why you’re here. To relieve them.

Plants scrape against the sides of the warthog, one overarching branch snapping across the visor of the Blue Squad’s new recruit, Jernigan. He grunts, another half-mute bastard like you, except he didn’t get his throat shot out. He just has a poor time using words due to some kind of childhood trauma. You heard someone named Ghanoush make a bet with his friend that it was his parents getting shot (or disappeared) by Feds. 

Their passive mention of the topic makes you assume its common. You have the tact not to ask or perform a survey or whatever the fuck normal people do to obtain casually abhorrent data from their peers. 

As the highest ranked in the squad behind Vass, you are put in charge while she continues to recover. This means you drive, apparently. The constant bouncing of wheels over mud and roots doesn’t give you a moment to relive the moments of Freelancer, behind the wheel.

Pulling onto the main road, the only road the warthog can smoothly glide on, you see exactly what it is about this village that’s setting off the alarms in your head, your body gearing up to dump all the things it needs to start the chemical reaction to send you running or fighting for safety.

It’s empty. And full.

Blood has dried in dripping sprays on the mix of squat residential prefabs and structures of bricks and wood. The latter structures are on the fringe, secondary additions that must’ve come after the war started, and there are unarmored bodies and armored bodies sprawled out. A mess that no one bothered to clean up.

“Any sight of targets?” Your speaker reads out and Belmonte’s arm practically spasms next to you, still adapting to the fact you can speak actual words now with Jensen’s technological work-around. 

Jernigan grunts a negative, Belmonte and Fabbri both echoing with actual words. The warthog slows to a crawl. 

“No sign of their warthog, either.” Fabbri mutters, the fact concerning you and stirring up the acid in your stomach as much as it seems to upset her. 

“Jesus christ, what happened?” Belmonte grumbles, observing the carnage, and you hate what you see with every growing moment of silence. 

Half of the bodies are dressed in torn up clothes or just clothing that didn’t look clean, fresh, or well-fitted, wounds and weather exposure notwithstanding. All the wounds appear to be gunshots, no knife wounds, despite what you not is a lot of machetes kept by civilians who live near the jungle and tend to be too large for typical NR ordinance loadouts.

You pass a bland storefront, its windows blown in, a civilian body sprawled over the sill and an NR soldier collapsed on the ground at their feet, bled dry into the concrete foundation. 

You find the warthog crammed into the center of the square. You pull to a stop about two and a half yards short and stare, for a long moment, at the armored corpse in the front seat, charred from what you can assume was an explosion set off in the engine while the thing was idle. There’s a half-charred corpse stretched out towards a corner building, likely one who survived long enough to crawl away before someone put a bullet in the back of their neck. 

The seats have been removed of their cushioning, or it has been melted into them, it doesn’t matter. There has been no report of black smoke from the fucked up fusion of carriage, armor, ordinance, and survival supplies, but this is also on the fringe of jungle and the NR is based in a pit in the bottom of the planet, so. 

“Jesus christ,” Belmonte repeats, her revulsion seeping into every breath she exhaled. You feel it. You read their deployment report to the village. You know the name of every soldier body you look at, if not the faces the names belong to, and each one is a stone in the bottom of your gut. You suppose it’s easier for Belmonte to move the weight of those stones to the skin of her legs. You ponder, momentarily, why she decided to use her legs. 

You can’t squeeze the warthog past the other torched fucking mess with half-melted wheels, so you and your team jump out.

“Jernigan, stay here, guard the ‘hog. I take point.” Jernigan offers no displeasure at his assigned task, which you recognize is a bit selfish as it keeps the squad you know with him, simply nods and situates himself at the back of the hog with his rifle aimed at the gaps between the nearest set of houses. There’s likely not very many access points for the roofs.

You discover the biggest wooden house at the end of the central road, walls exploded outward and mainly only charred remnants of what was once it’s walls and only half of the brick remaining in the shin-high wall while the rest is scattered in fragments and dust. There’s chunks of skeletons, at least over a dozen sets, you don’t calculate the sizes.

This building was longer than the rest, and you assume the morphed metal shapes are remnants of bed frames with strips of mattress or skin, or whatever turned oily black, fused to the metal.

“What was this?” You ask, hoping the people who’ve actually seen civilian life in its normal, not war-torn state, can explain to you. Fabbri pauses, stares up at it, and you think you detect a quiver in her voice.

“A refuge house.” 

“Hrrm?” When Fabbri doesn’t quickly answer, Belmonte supplies. 

“With all the war going on, there’s been a fuck-ton of people’s places getting destroyed. When there’s a fuck ton of wrecked places, people have to go somewhere. Proper refugee centers weren’t really a thing with the Feds dumping a majority of their budget into the war effort. So, they built refugee houses. Or, supported their construction, anyway.”

“They?”

“Anyone. Fed, NR, anyone, they...” She glances at the rebel corpses, likely putting a name to that one, though you can’t tell for sure. “Guess the Feds were much more interested in putting an end to our presence then the safety of the civilians.” 

You feel vaguely sick. Think of Locus, of his squad, of the reports you read of what were presumed to be drone strikes on NR bases though few survived to verify that, Barone’s helmet shattered inward, curling into the epicenter where the sniper round punched through visor, skull and the back of his helmet.

The Feds seem to be dehumanizing themselves faster than you can do it to them for yourself. That’s fine. It makes it easier to shoot them and it makes you happier for it.

But it also pisses you off when they make it away without a bullet in some important organ. That’s fine. For every NR soldier, every fuckin’ Chorusan kid who didn’t have any better idea on how to save their home, every frien, every one they put a hole through, you’re gonna kill a squad. Maybe take some of Felix’s unworded preferences and take your time so that they can experience the hollow gutting of guilt in the real, bloody way that leaves their organs genuinely failing at the end.

You’re clenching your teeth. The ache is pulsing through the tooth Locus broke and you have to take in measured breaths, think about your heart, let a tendril of ease snake through your chest, just to unclench your jaw and push away the ache. 

You lead your squad in a broad sweep of the village, counting the refugee and rebel corpses. You eventually call Jernigan to bring the Warthog around, with its consistent soft rumble that makes the nerves under your skin less twitchy.

You heave all the NR corpses into the back of the warthog, tucking them into body bags under the benches, and on the floor. Cramming onto the seating on top of corpses won’t be comfortable, but Belmonte and Fabbri just want to get their troops back home to bury properly and don’t care about the return trip as long as they’re moving. It’s always good when you have the chance to do that.

“Mai- Sir.” Fabbri asks, once you heave a too-light corpse into the back of the warthog. Recovering the corpse fused to the seat of the warthog is impossible. You turn to look at her, having gone completely silent since the remains of the refuge house. “I- I would like to catalogue the faces of the refugees and the villagers. Our people might know who they are.” 

You don’t shake your head, you stare, think, the first thought to come to your mind is that you hope no one knows who these people are. A distant, secondary thought is that if they do, it’s a motivator of anger to pulp the F.A.C regime before it can properly rise again. But also another way for people to get angry and stupid, cause kids do that, and you’re very clearly not immune to that either even after an intensive history in military training to _not_ be stupid when pissed. 

Nod to Fabbri. These are dead. Not your dead, not in your mind yet, but the Feds wiped them out and that’s enough to make you want to know who they are. You don’t _need_ to know. You _don’t_. Don’t think like that.

_“During rampancy, an AI will try to process too much data at a time, and eventually, in simplistic terms, think itself to death.” The Counselor’s smooth voice, it makes you uneasy,_ he’s _humming at the back of your head—_

Fabbri takes out a datapad and goes through the process of taking photographs and brief data estimates of the dead. Belmonte pauses, a body half-zipped into a bodybag on the ground. 

“She was raised in refuge house.” She offers, quietly, as Fabbri gets further and further away. You nod towards Fabbri to Jernigan and give him the implicit instructions to cover her while she did so. There’s no sign of incoming Feds, or that they even stayed to do anything following their little massacre, but it gives Belmonte time to talk to you.

“Sometimes, the Feds would storm them if they thought NR were operating out of them. After the first few casualties, Levitt called an end to putting our people there. It’s one of the only things from him that Hine’s really listened to.” Belmonte zips the rest of the bag up over the helmeted face and rests her hand there in reverence. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one.” 

It’s several hours before Fabbri officially decrees she’s catalogued all the bodies she’s seen and your squad has swept every building in the village to ensure no Feds lingered.

The drive is in silent. At some point, you catch Belmonte rubbing a reassuring hand on the buscle of Fabbri’s shoulder.

“It’s okay, ‘Rie.” Belmonte is mumbling, their helmets _dink_ ing against each other. “It’s okay.” 

Fabbri sniffles, makes a sound that might’ve been a ‘no it’s not.’ You focus on driving. Jernigan places a hand on Fabbri’s shoulder in a mute solidarity.

You focus harder.

* * *

You give your first auditory report to Hine and visit Hine’s office for the first time after you return from your trip to Lemle.

After you help with the laborous process of heaving NR corpses into the management of the New Republic corpsmen, Hinearrives at the motorpool. 

“Corporal, can I speak with you?” You nod, leaving the others with the job of storing the bodies properly, and walk across the motorpool to the General. She’s absent of her helmet, her hair pulled up in a tight bun as usual, though in the light you notice the streaks of grey.

“Yes, General?” She doesn’t seem as fazed by the new update to your armor like the others, but she doesn’t spend that much time with you and the mechanical voice does sound, vaguely in a bored sort of way, human. 

“Come on, let’s walk. I want to hear the report from you.” Hine guides you on a walk through the metal structures of the old mining compound, the air is damper, condensation from the here as you continue going deeper in the general direction of Hine’s office.

“So, state of the village?” She asks, once you’re out of view.

“No survivors. Fabbri catalogued all the deceased civilians. (You, purposefully, did not ask how many) None of the squad’s equipment could be salvaged, including the warthog.” Hine’s expression knits minutely at the center, barely a shift. The army barely has any warthogs, unfortunately, hardly enough to spare. “Minimal structure damage. Except for the refuge house.”

She nods. “No Feds were present. I assume they left after the massacre.”

“What can you tell me about the attack, Maine?” Her voice is very present, and she uses your name in a way that feels like a trickle of ice cold water down the curve of your spine.

“The attack started and ended quick. There were barely any forms of barricades, and the ones there were seemed to be done quickly by civilians.”

“How many Feds do you assume?”

“That depends, how experienced was the patrol?”

“Unfortunately, not very much. The sergeant was the most experienced woman on that squad and she’d only been a sergeant for a few months. This was supposed to be a quick scouting trip.” She thought they’d be safe, so close to the New Republic, but they weren’t. You can understand that. 

“The force may have been small and experienced and taken the squad by surprise. But I think that the Feds may have been waiting for them.” 

“Really?”

“Someone planted explosives in the refuge house. I don’t know if it would have been an undercover Fed or a normal Fed force that strong-armed civilians. Or the civilians could’ve been Fed loyalists.”

“Doesn’t make much of a difference, unfortunately,” Hine exhales like she can express all the strain and exhaustion of running this army through a single sound. You know from observation that is not a possible feat, no matter how loud she can get.

“Because we can’t tell?” 

“Because they’re all the same, Corporal.” This sounds like words she’s said often, like they’ve fallen off her tongue often enough there’s a shortcut for it in her brain. 

“The same, ma’am?” Hine pauses, turns on her heel to face you and you turn to face her in a slightly delayed reaction.

“Fed loyalists and Fed soldiers are the same breed of people. They either don’t know or don’t care what their government has done, they don’t care what we say, and the only difference is that one takes a gun into their own hands and points it at us, and the other takes the law and the mob. Their justice is the only one they care about. They’re the same breed of bastards that threw us on this planet to mine it dry for the Inner Colonies and then left when it became inconvenient.”

Hine is not old enough to have been one of the first generations of colonizers. She’s old enough to have seen the after effects. 

“Fed loyalists are just harder to see than the Fed soldiers.” Hine turns, takes a few steps, and then opens a door that you realize is her office. There’s a discolored patch on the door with holes that imply someone tore the plaque off. You follow her in, the door sliding close of its own accord despite not being automatic, and you get your first glimpse of the General office.

It’s probably the mine’s facility manager office, with a grimey window overlooking a wide swath of the New Republic camp, which looks vaguely sad in the twilight light of a gloomy sky waiting for the arrival of the rainstorm. There are safeguards in place to keep the place from flooding, you know based on the old maps which were out of date even before people stopped working here, but that’s not a good encouragement. 

Hine drops into the seat behind the desk which squeals in protest, the leather skin of the upholstery torn away to reveal the ugly rot-yellow foam beneath. Her desk has clearly seen better days, but it must have been the original manager’s, constructed from some kind of wood you don’t recognize.

There’s a physical photograph pinned to the wall in a glass-less frame, of Hine and two other girls who shared the same nose and eyes. Her hair is missing the shocks of grey and white. Hine gestures at a seat, an offer, and you shake your head. She does not repeat her request, which is a request, and simply steeples her gloved hands.

“Maine, I sent you and your squad out to Lemle for a reason. Even though Sergeant Vass is still in recovery.” You stand stock still, try to estimate the strength of the broad window behind her desk, try to understand what she could mean, come up with nothing you like. 

“You were not expecting Feds.”

“No. This is the Fed’s MO, when it comes to places like Lemle. I sent a squad out because Lemle was getting big enough to start developing noise that the Feds could pick up and I wanted them to ensure the villagers were safe.”

“MO?”

“The Feds have done this before. When a village starts taking in enough refugees, the Feds get paranoid, send their men out to check for our activity. They did this before, too.” Her eyes briefly get distant, her posture tenses at the shoulders, but she doesn’t stop. “The New Republic scared them then, it scares them now, and without the news nets properly up and functioning, no one can hold them accountable for when they get twitchy and decide a drone strike or bomb is better than double-checking their sources, if they have any.”

You have a suspicion Hine was a detective of some kind before she was a General.

“You sent the squad to lure the Feds?” You ask, because you have to, because that desire to _know_ more is weirdly _there_ and Hine hasn’t lied to you yet. 

“No.” Hine says, sharply. “I sent the squad to protect the village _from_ the Feds. And show them we’re not psychopathic anarchists who want mother nature to rule over us all.”

“They think that?”

“A couple people, yeah. Same ones that let the Feds kill several hundred people ‘cause they didn’t like to look too hard.” She looks tired. You’re quiet as she reaches a hand up and undoes the bun at the back of her head. Braids, some shot through with grey-white of a lovely combo of stress and age, come free down her back and she exhales. 

The room seems to shift. 

“Why send us then?” You finally ask.

“Because you needed to see and there’re some kids here who’d like to see their friends properly buried when they can.”

“You knew they were dead.”

“When they failed to hit their second check-in transmission, I did.” Hine admits, which makes it harder for the fire to do much more than smolder at her for it. “I sent you because I wanted you to see.” 

“See?”

“Yes, Maine. You’ve seen what the Feds left, read about what the Feds did, saw your fellow men and women dead on the field-” she does not consider you do not see the NR troops as your fellows in arms. You realize she’s not incorrect to assume. “But there’s a big difference between soldiers getting shot on the field they stepped onto, and civilians being involuntarily put in the crosshairs because those in command are too twitchy.”

For a moment, you experience free-fall and the distant observation of a hundred-something story building collapsing inward around the slug of a MAC gun, your blood pumping for the fight, not the horror, for the men with the guns, the objective, not the people, the people there, _dying dying dying—_

You’re in Hine’s office and she’s staring at you and you realize you’ve gone shakily quiet long enough to concern her. 

“Personal.”

“Huh?”

“Civilians. Feds shooting them. Its personal.”

“And illegal.” You wanna shrug, tell her ‘so am I’ because you as an existing result of something else, are very much the result of dozens of broken regs and laws, which does not include your actions over the past four or so years before Chorus. “But, yes, very personal. Maine, I wanted you to see that, not because I’m some asshole who thinks you haven’t seen the horrors of war, I _know_ you have.” And she does. Everyone does, really. “But I wanted you to see the horrors of our war. So that you know what we’re fighting to put an end to.”

You blink at her, think. You think about the destroyed population of Lemle. 

“We’re fighting to put an end to a government that doesn’t care how it stays in power, just that it does. If we don’t hold them accountable, there won’t be any justice for the bodycount they’ve wracked up.”

You think of Washington, setting of an EMP at the heart of Command, of the vague memory of his conversation with the Counselor and the Director. Think about what he was fighting for. To put an end to something horrible and hold them accountable.

“Understood, General.” Your helmet reads out, as you think back to the reports of what the Feds and their supporters had done before you landed here. You were fighting this war because it was there, Maine, fighting it because you were built from the ground up to be a soldier, not caring so long as your gun was pointed at something, never really thinking about the war’s end even though that was what you were supposed to be fighting for, because you would never be one of the people who got to enjoy it.

But the longer this war goes on, the more innocent and good people die. People who don't deserve it. 

“Dismissed.”

Later that week at the Mess, Hine reveals her idea to finally put an end to the war.

For once in your life, you genuinely think about a world after war. One where you can have the time and ability to learn sign language, enjoy Chorus' natural environments without your armor, try funnel cake. 

And you want it.

* * *

You get your face shaved for the first time a few days after Hine reveals her plan, the night before she steps aboard a long-term project of salvaged FTL engine crammed into the hardiest air transport in the New Republic’s arsenal.

Jernigan is the one who offers and he shows you how to shave the itchy annoyance of a beard with a knife because no one in the NR really has razors. Or shaving cream. It's a miracle Jernigan doesn't nick skin. 

It’s not as intimate as one would naturally assume, with Jernigan holding your face still (you will never admit to leaning into the touch) and curving the blade of a knife along the curve of your jaw. Maybe that’s because he’s quiet and you hardly know him and he doesn’t seem that interested in really anything. He doesn’t cut you at all, though you most likely will in your future attempts. 

When you look back in the mirror, you see a face that doesn’t look like the one you remember staring back at you from the reflective visors of dying Freelancers. There’s a scar from where Locus kicked you, a patch of lighter scar tissue that sticks out from the smooth brown skin, but it’s the only scar you got on Chorus that you see on your face. 

You thank Jernigan with a smooth growl and he shrugs.

“I heard you complain about it, figured I’d help.”

You’d only ever complained about your facial hair once, Maine. 


	10. Salvation

The end of your sixth month on Chorus, you experience the first death of a General you’ve ever witnessed. 

You don’t think General Hine is going to die, the thought barely reaches you outside of the required thinking about the risks this poses. The Feds may very well shoot her out of the sky with whatever AA they’ve managed to rig up during the war, track the heat signature to the cavern you and your fellow rebels have set up your lives (which is why the ship itself was crammed into a hollow on the highest hill in the jungle that’s only a days’ trip out from base. 

You’re among the collection of Hine’s good-bye party, the security, which is your squad plus Felix. The techs and mechanics that were working on the ship are there. The hill is where Hine’s stashed a majority of the New Republic’s non-combatants for safe-keeping. You hear them mention attempts to develop a hydroponics facility.

The ship itself is an ancient Pelican, fitted with an FTL engine and stripped of anything in the shrunken blood tray. The New Republic of Chorus’s symbol is painted identically on both of the wings,  _ Salvation  _ painted on the side. A fitting name. 

The facility is well kept, still afflicted by the plague of rust and jungle moss as everywhere else, and you try to avoid doing a headcount of how many civilians are here. Some of them have holsters, some look too old to be expected to step onto the field, some too young to have the same expectation, and all of them with marks of age and exhaustion carved into their faces. 

Most of them stop to stare at you, because you’re the tallest fucking soldier in the NR, even if Vass is back on her feet, taking point with stiff steps to avoid aggravating the fresh scarring over her abdomen. 

You arrive with General Hine and Kimball while the loading crew is still placing a week’s worth of supplies into the small storage the remodeled troop bay allows. 

You’ve read through the plan before, when Hine outlined it on the New Republic data server for them all to understand how long it had been going on and how much thought had gone to it. There had hardly been any tweaks to said plan, those that were made mainly centered around the timing. It was nearing Chorus’ worse storm season, so the launch had to occur quickly and in the interval of time where the clouds could obstruct plenty of the view but hardly complicate the exit from Chorus’ atmosphere. 

The UNSC wouldn’t support a rebellion against their personal interests (you are well aware of this), so Hine decided she would go with the only other option. Felix had willingly offered up a list of cords to a handful of colonies who could assist her, plus the bonus advice that “Hey, if that fails, there are always the Kig-Yar. I’m pretty sure you could pay them the same shit you pay me.”

“Ah, I thought there was a family resemblance.” Belmonte snickers over your private TEAMCOM channel, beating you to the joke, lightly elbowing you in the right side. Fabbri makes a little snorting sound and Vass’ responding grunt is a terrible disguise of the snicker preceding it. 

You don’t think Belmonte’s ever seen Felix’s face, either. You’ve decide the bird-esque, plumed head of a Jackal probably isn’t that far off. 

Felix dismisses himself with a wave, “I need to double-check the NAV computer.” He thunks his way up the lowered bay door, not bothering to duck out of the crews’ way as he goes. 

Hine pulls Kimball aside for a conversation, which might not be meant for you to hear, but you manage to catch the whisps and the mouth shapes of words. She undoes her helmet, plants a hand on Kimball’s shoulder and squeezes with an affection in her eyes that pulls on something in your chest.

“I made you my Lieutenant General for a reason, Vanessa. You’ll be a good leader while I’m gone,” Hine’s optimistic estimate is that she’ll be gone a max of a month, but Felix informs her that a realistic assumption is way bigger (though he did not offer any hard numbers, you assume it’s because he’s an asshole withholding data for hopes of a bigger paycheck). 

Hine pulls Kimball into a hug, which is uncomfortable in full armor, but Kimball wraps her arms around Hine and leans into it and you suspect Hine’s on the verge of tears when she pulls away and turns away. 

She checks with the head of the Pelican crew, Kimball follows at her side and Felix drops out the side of the open bay like he doesn’t have time to take the three strides needed for him to cross the door. He claps his hands together, a loud  _ snap  _ kind of noise that draws tension in your arms. “Alright, we got the coordinates, we got the Pelican, now we just need some generous assholes to throw us a bone once you reach ‘em. You ready, General?”

Hine turns from her conversation with the crew head and blinks at him, closes her eyes, exhales, and returns her helmet to her head. 

“Ready as I’ll ever be, Felix.” There’s a second crack, you momentarily weigh the consequences of shooting Felix in the hands, and the General steps into the Pelican. The door seals shut once the rest of the crew hops out of the Pelican. You watch as the crew slaps on some headsets and becomes the launch crew. Felix slips away to observe something or other, his words don’t fully reach you. 

They guide Hine quickly through the pre-flight checks, reference the training she’s been undertaking over the past few weeks, and you watch as the Pelican’s thrusters heat up and the rumble of them cuts through the entire room. 

The Pelican’s thrusters shift, pushing the Pelican straight up through the weathered gap in the rock ceiling, and the sound suddenly shifts a few decibels quieter once the gray bird rises over the lip. 

You crane your neck, watching the Pelican rise, illuminated by the odd grey-yellow glow of the sun trying to peer through the weaker clouds. You wonder if this weather is typical, if this it’ll bother you after the war and you have the time to watch it. If you’ll even be able to see it, wherever you wind up living, or if residual pollution will cloud it up. 

You watch as the Pelican steady gains altitude, Hine changing course in accordance with the timing of the ground crew, and it tilts forward but still rising. 

And then it explodes. 

You’re not sure where the explosion originates, you can’t tell, because one moment the Pelican is soaring steadily up for Chorus’ atmosphere, and the next it’s a giant metal shell spewing plumes of wild smoke and angry fire that spews wildly out of the wing nacelles. 

Your heart seizes up, leaps for your mouth, Fabbri screams. 

“Squad, follow!” Vass shouts, turning and booking it for the quickest exit out of the facility. You’re on her heels, Jernigan behind you, and Belmonte dragging Fabbri and swearing up a storm that echoes behind you.

Your lurch out of the facility, onto a flat of cut rock, and watch the stream of smoke following the gray shape of the  _ Salvation _ . There’s the cracks and snaps as it hits trees, cuts into them, and one wing breaks off in a brilliant spray of smoke, fire, and mechanical fluids. 

Hine. 

“We need to go.” Your helmet reads, lacking urgency, which ticks off a nerve in the back of your skull but you ultimately can’t fix. 

“Someone get Felix outside!” Kimball’s voice echoes and you turn to see she’s charging out the way you came up. “Blue squad, follow me!” 

The next two minutes, you’re following Kimball’s heavy footfalls at a jogging pace for the warthog that you drove here, Felix already standing at the passenger side. 

You leap onto the side, Kimball keys the ignition, Fabbri barely scrambles in before Kimball is speeding off in the direction of the  _ Salvation’s  _ smoke trail.

You growl, urging the warthog faster, clinging tightly to the bars and wishing you could go faster, faster,  _ faster _ —

The clouds converge overhead. It starts raining. The smoke vanishes above the jungle canopy, but Felix reassures, “I marked it on my HUD, we’ll get there.” The raindrops are huge, pitter-patter sensations on your arms.

You cling tighter. Grit your teeth and try to hold still, hold yourself in this moment, but the tether snaps and— 

_ You cling to the warthog, York politely informing the civilian vehicles to get out of his way as if they can hear, Innies jumping down from above, spraying bullets, aiming for you, Dr. Rhee’s suitcase on your back, Carolina jumps— _

The  _ Salvation’s _ torn off thick branches of the jungle canopy, which had seemingly retaliated by tearing up the hull and removing most of the left wing and the entirety of the right one. It leaves the pelican in a sort of flattened ovoid shape, its front crumpled into rock and dirt and a half-collapsed tree.

You’re leaping out of the warthog before it’s stopped, running the several yards distance without a fuck given for the shouting behind you. Your boots thump and spray up mud and rainwater and you nearly slide into the trench dug by the ship. You leap onto the metal and it creaks under your boots. 

“Maine!” Someone’s yelling after you. Maybe several. 

There’s no memory of your CO going down in a Pelican. You never lost a CO in a Pelican, though the vague nagging that you might have is there even though there’s the pulsing rage and  _ no  _ and  _ fuck  _ and vivid and vague feelings that would visually translate to the entire Federal army getting their guts torn out through their mouths.

The cockpit is a crumpled pancake that’s gone from being wide enough to fit a gunner’s seat, a pilot’s seat, and a bunch of computer junk, to a vaguely crumpled point that could maybe fit a human. Maybe. 

The windows have shattered, but you can’t fit anything beyond a hand into the darkness, and you see blood, diluted by rain, sprayed on the remaining fragments.

Hine. Hine, Hine,  _ Hine—  _ You’re growling, angry and clawing at the metal, desperation seeping through like hot water through your veins, into your muscles,  _ fuck _

“Corporal! STAND DOWN!” Kimball or maybe Vass screams, your arms spasm, an instinct to stop at the order that you brutally shove aside and claw wildly at the darkness inside the Pelican, a glimpse of charred and bloody armor— 

Hands grab tightly onto the collar of your armor and pull you back. 

You snarl, screech, claw angrily but then you’re flung backwards into the mud. Cold sinks through the bodysuit and your head snaps back with the momentum, eyes blurring, burning, you leap back to your feet—

Felix shoves a hand against your chest as the Pelican explodes a second time, a delayed reaction that blows a big, smoldering hole in the remains of the left nacelle. It sprays up mud and trampled foliage into your visor. 

“Dude, back the fuck up!” Felix snaps at you but you claw at him, shove him aside, you have to help Hine. You can’t read her biostats, you don’t know what’s happening to her— Felix grabs onto your arm, fingers hooking hard into the armor undersuit, “fuckin’  _ stop—!”  _

Your fist cracks across the flat plane of the right of his helmet and he lurches sideways with the momentum. You lash out again, shove him while he’s unbalanced. He lands on his side in the mud with a heavy clatter of armor plates and you screech at him, you stomp towards him, you’re gonna _ kill him _ , you’re gonna kill him, you’re gonna—

You drop to Felix’s level, and beat at him, beat like your hands are hammers, you smell smoke and metal and death death  _ death—  _ Felix flails, tries to stop your from striking him in the face, you hit him in the throat, you’re screaming over the distant thunder and roll of rain on the canopy. His boots pointlessly churn up mud and water behind you, knees thumping against your back. 

“MAINE!” Vass shouts and you pause, turn to see Kimball storming up to you. You blink, think,  _ think _ , of Hine’s arm pulled around Kimball’s shoulders, eyes sparkling with unshed tears,  _ ‘So that you know what we’re fighting to put an end to.’  _ Felix is shaking and wheezing swears at you. 

Wetness is inside your helmet, hot and sticky against your face, and you realize there are tears. It’s not the rainwater on your visor that’s blurring your vision. 

“Maine, stand down.” Kimball orders in a calm that sends a shiver through your skin that isn’t from the chill of the mud still clinging to your armor. 

Bile rises in your throat. You want to throw up. 

You stand up and Felix loudly gasps, clawing at the release on his helmet and letting the angular thing drop into his lap as he sits up, sucking in desperate breaths, cussing you out in between his coughing. “Fucking-  _ psycho-  _ asshole—” Anger seeds itself in your neural pathways, seething, dredging up memories you shove back into the mud just to focus on how much Felix is pissing you off and the fact your hands ache despite his helmet looking fine, smeared in watery mud.

Felix isn’t that old, his face narrow and his brown hair in an undercut with long hair spiked up wildly, vaguely like a mohawk, dyed a luminescent orange. You think of a Jackal with it’s plumed skull and narrow beak. The rainwater soaks into his hair and drips over his shaking form. His eyes keep wildly shifting to you, you can see the whites in the dark of the rain. You do not see any signs of bruising on his face. 

“Felix?”

He sucks in a ragged breath, coughs on it, “Fuckin’ fine, don’t worry, General.” Kimball’s posture goes tense. Felix doesn’t seem to care, he inhales, exhales, gingerly touches the right side of his face as if feeling for breaks. 

“Ma’am, is General Hine—?” Vass starts.

“She’s fuckin’ dead, soldier.” Felix says, rising to his feet, rain washing mud from the angular shapes of his armor. “No one could survive that.” He says as he seals his helmet back over his head. 

“I could.” Your helmet reads out, Felix glances at you.

“Yeah, well, she’s no super-soldier, asshole. Now, General, do you want me to double-check?”

“Yes, Felix, I want you to double-check.” Kimball’s voice is carefully restrained and Felix mutters something under his breath before stomping over to the Pelican and peering in through the shattered glass. He violently jerks back at whatever he sees.

“Fuck!” 

“Felix?”

“She’s dead, Kimball.” Felix announces. “What didn’t get blown up in the blast is crushed in the computers.” He decides it’s extremely helpful to add “it’s an ugly-ass sight, General.” 

“Dammit.” Kimball hisses, makes an aborted motion with her hand like she wants to comb it through her hair.

Felix walks over, stops a good distance from you. 

“So, guess that’s official. You’re the new General of the New Republic, Kimball. First order of business?” Felix sounds like he’s trying to be happy, sounds like an asshole, sounds somewhat tired. You consider punching him in the throat, make him sound in pain.

Kimball blinks, looks at you. You just tried to punch her merc’s face in. She’s your General now. She might be crying. You are.

You thump a fist to your chest, nodding to Kimball. An apology isn’t on your mind and not what she wants, because she also wants to punch Felix in his fucking face. At least you assume. There’s probably a fair bit of projection in said assumption. 

“General.” You hope she gets the respect you’re trying to inject into the helmet mic, which is half clogged with mud. Jensen will hopefully be able to fix that. 

“Let’s go home, troops.” Kimball sounds resigned, but her voice is clear even over the rain. “We’ve got an army to debrief.” 

You hop back into the warthog. Kimball puts Felix behind the wheel, maybe because she doesn’t trust herself to focus ahead, and you purposefully don’t sit near the rest of your squad. 

“You alright, Maine?” Someone asks. You stare down at your boots, rain washing the bloody mud from the grooves, and don’t answer.

Belmonte knocks her foot against your shin, does it again with some more force when you don’t look up from you damn boots. You’re not thinking much about the way the mud is running from your boots. Your mind is shifting to the back of Four-Seven-Niner’s Pelican, dripping coagulated blood onto the grated floor, Florida taking off his helmet and barely blinking at the stench, grinning at you,  _ “good job— _

Hine, half her body crumpled into a bloody pulp by the Pelican dash, eyes bulged in horror, armor fused to her body, the pelican her coffin and smoking pyre “ _ I knew you would—” _

You casually unseal your helmet, set it in your lap, turn your head, and vomit out the side of the warthog.

“Jesus!” Belmonte reacts, though you don’t see her, and the muscles across your stomach coil as they squeeze out a couple more ounces of half-digested food and bile. Acid burns the back of your tongue, rainwater dribbles over your lips and vaguely reduces the burn. You hang there for a moment, clinging to the edge of the vehicle bed. 

Rain sinks cold, wet fingers into your hair and your skin feels hot, soothed by the cold, and it washes away the sticky trails of tears. You turn, settling back into your spot and letting the rain pitter-patter on the curves of your face. Your eyes still burn. You reseal your helmet, trapping some extra rainwater on the inside. 

“You okay?” Belmonte asks, leaning forward with hands opened as if she can help soothe you somehow, and there’s a hint of a tremor snaking its way through your aching fingers.

You shake your head.

Jernigan rests a hand on your shoulder, clings to your pauldron, and you don’t know if he’s trying to hold himself together via you or if he’s scared you’re gonna snap and try to beat someone’s face in.

You don’t particularly mind either option. 

You’re unmoving, unresponsive, the rest of the trip to HQ. But so is everyone else, so at least you don’t feel too much like a mute statue.

  
  


When the warthog parks and you all dismount, you half expect Kimball or Vass to corner you and call you out for losing your shit and trying to beat Felix’s helmet in. But they don’t. You pause as Kimball steps away with Felix to talk about something. Your hands still hurt. 

Everyone in the cavern gathers at the main compound within ten minutes. Half of them have thrown on their armor to defend them from the steady streams of water coming in over the lips of the ceiling gaps and the heavy pitter-patter of the rain. Kimball stands high up, Felix at her back, and she announces the news.

“Earlier today, our General Lani Hine took our FTL-fitted Pelican, the  _ Salvation _ , with intent to retrieve support for our cause against the Feds.” You can practically hear Kimball swallow in her pause. “Before she could leave atmosphere, the Feds shot the Pelican down.”

A pause, another moment to process, your stomach burns.

“General Hine did not survive…” Kimball pauses, waits, continues, “Which leaves me in the position as your new General. I… I am sorry for what happened to Hine. I know many of us were putting our hopes into that trip to bring us to the end of this damn war. I’m sure many of us are going to feel guilty that we didn’t stop her, but it is not your fault. It is not Hine’s fault. It is the fault of the Federal Army. They are the ones who assassinated General Levitt at peace talks, they are the ones who shot down Hine, and they are the ones who have stolen our homes from us, stolen our family from us, and they will continue to steal from us until we put a stop to it.” 

There’s a loud chant of ‘Fuck the Feds!’ from the back of the crowd. 

Kimball nods. “This war is not fucking over! This war will not end until the Feds pay for all they’ve done. So, tonight, tonight we grieve for our General. But tomorrow, tomorrow we remember who we’re fighting for. What do we fight for?”

“A better tomorrow!”

“What do we fight for?” Kimball repeats, louder, shouting over the storm. 

“A better tomorrow!”

“What do we fight for, New Republic?  _ What do we fight for _ ?”

“A better tomorrow!”

The chant carries through the caverns, underlain by the thunder. The chant continues on and on. “A better tomorrow! A better tomorrow! A better tomorrow!”

You join in, throwing a fist in the air with the rest of the New Republic, screaming as close to a chant as you can get. 

That is what you want, Maine. A better tomorrow. One where you can walk the street without armor and actually consider the idea of never having to point a loaded gun at someone again.

That is what you fight for. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. A sequel to How Did You Get Here?
> 
> Fun fact, I was originally aiming for 10,000 words of brief events when I started this on May 28th, two days after HDYGH was posted, motivated by the immediate positive reaction (thank you so much for that!). This wasn't finished until June 30th, which was about a month of writing. This was actually a really fun thing to write and I'm super glad to share it at long last! It's kinda trippy to work on a project that long for me and then post it because I'm just really used to not finishing things. 
> 
> This was also a first for me, as both the longest thing I've ever written and the first time I had a beta reader (Ryder from Discord!) involved.
> 
> I fully intended to kill off most of Maine's squad but I only had the opportunity for lil boy Barone.
> 
> (Yes, I totally read the title of this chapter to the tune of Death of a Bachelor and also I kept thinking it was raining outside as I wrote the ending. It's very dry here in central CA)
> 
> If you have any ideas for scenes you'd like to see, or any other random RvB fic ideas you'd like to throw my way, feel free to hit me up at the link below on tumblr (anon friendly!), I'm always looking to keep writing!  
> https://illusion-of-sea-axes.tumblr.com/


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